
Datadog raises $31M for cloud monitoring - clofresh
http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/28/investors-thow-datadog-a-31m-bone/
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socialist_coder
Datadog is great. I converted my New Relic monitoring over to Datadog without
too much hassle. I was only using the backend monitoring part of New Relic so
I didn't miss any of those features. The dashboards are much better, the event
stream is really cool, the AWS integrations are great, and the front end is
pretty speedy. And the best part, it costs about 5-10x less (which is what
prompted the conversion to Datadog in the first place).

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rev_bird
New Relic is second to none when it comes to being able to do deep dives into
finding out which API call is causing slowdowns where, but Datadog aggregates
data better than anything else I've ever used -- to me, the monitoring part is
just a nice side-feature.

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socialist_coder
Only if you are running a supported language / server. That feature doesn't
really work at all for .NET web-api apps =(

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willxu
Product manager from Datadog here. Better .Net (and Windows) support is
coming.

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socialist_coder
To be clear, I was talking about the automatic "deep dives into finding out
which API call is causing slowdowns" part of New Relic. That is a useful
feature, but it doesn't work at all on .NET web-api apps so it wasn't a reason
for me to stay with New Relic.

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Cyranix
Kudos to Datadog. I'm not a current customer, but when I took it for a trial
run several months ago I found it to be visually appealing, reliable, and
intuitive. It didn't have some of the advanced features that you would get
with Hosted Graphite or Librato at the time, but it was a very strong
contender. All of us will benefit from the high-quality competition occurring
in this space!

~~~
boundlessdreamz
What features of librato did you not find in Datadog? I'm a current librato
customer and I from what I see datadog is better in most aspects. Also the
datadog integrations are awesome. The collecd integration is just ok

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corford
We're using Datadog to monitor job stats on a busy RabbitMQ host and it's
fantastic.

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javery
We routinely pummel Datadog with massive amounts of data from hundreds of
hosts and it does an amazing job of showing us the data we need and alerting
us when something is wrong. Highly recommended.

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sciurus
Datadog is very nice. Here's something I wrote when asked what value we were
getting from it-
[https://gist.github.com/sciurus/3a1cd4c203891c8d33b2](https://gist.github.com/sciurus/3a1cd4c203891c8d33b2)

# Why datadog? #

I would break it down into four pieces. Datadog is

1\. providing functionality

1\. we need

1\. in an easy-to-use manner

1\. that would be difficult to build and maintain ourselves

# 1) Functionality #

## The agent ##

It gathers system metrics, integrates with key software we use, and provides a
standard interface to which our applications can send custom metrics.

## Integrations ##

Datadog has prebuilt integrations to pull data from almost every important
service we use.

## Events ##

Through the integrations datadog generates a consolidated event stream that we
can filter and earch as needed.

## Dashboards ##

Datadog lets us build dashboards that combine metrics from many different
sources. We can combine and transform metrics to make them more useful. It
also provides an powerful interface for interactive exploration of metrics.

## Alerting ##

Datadog has nice stream processing capabilities for generating alerts, and it
can surface them in services we use like pagerduty and slack.

# 2) Need #

## The Agent ##

We don't get nearly enough insight from cloudwatch alone, we need an on-
instance tool to gather system and app metrics.

## Integrations ##

There are lots of services with operational signficiance, but many of them
don't provide a good way to access their data.

## Events ##

We would spend _dramatically_ longer investigating problems if we had to look
at eash source of events in isolation. Many of our event sources don't even
provide a way for us to view past events or to query them.

## Dashboards ##

Per-service and per-instance dashboards are important for investigating
problems quickly. The consolidation of data from multiple sources is again a
key feature.

## Alerting ##

We need to do anaylze trends in our metrics and alert on them.

# 3) Ease of use #

## The agent ##

The agent is deployable via a chef cookbook datadog wrote for us. It requires
minimal configuration. It knows which system and application metrics are worth
gathering.

## Integrations ##

Integrating with all the data sources is literally a few clicks.

## Events ##

The interface makes searching and filtering events straightforward.

## Dashboards ##

There are prebuilt dashbaords for lots of things we care about. Snazzy
features like autocomplete and templating make building our own dashboards
easy.

## Alerting ##

The guided steps and previewed outputs make creating alerts simple.

# 4) Hard to replicate #

Here I described a system of collectd, custom code to pull metrics from
cloudwatch, custom code to pull or receive events from various sources
(airbrake, cloudtrail, chef, pagerduty, jenkins, etc) influxdb, and grafana.

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mrdude42
Very informative post!

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Gigablah
Something worth noting: Datadog is currently the only monitoring service that
provides a Dockerized agent (so you can easily stick it into a CoreOS cluster,
for example).

