We are considering Datadog, and nothing else seems to compare to them, but they seem extremely expensive. As a small startup/solo founder, did your implementation justify costs?
Datadog is the best all around tool with APM and log monitoring built in. I highly recommend it as it will be substantially cheaper than paying for separate monitoring, apm, logs, etc.
The support is also a lot more receptive towards small business owners unlike other platforms such as New Relic.
Also if you send custom stats to datadog such as login activity, you can use their Anomaly detection to find suspicious behavior.
Disclaimer: we use datadog at my company and have tried all the other popular options. Hands down datadog is the most feature rich and user friendly.
Yes, it's been an incredibly valuable tool for me. I get the most out of the host monitoring and the logging / alerting. The APM is nice, but I'm not using it nearly as much as the other pieces.
Just getting logging centralized alone has saved me tons of time, which is in turn more time spent on the product. I've been able to use the log parsing to setup metrics that tell me when an outside integration is acting up and isolate which paths. Take a day to really learn how their logs work and you'll be able to generate metrics / advanced event alerting in no time.
I was hesitant to pay the premium, but the peace of mind has been worth it. You can piece the same thing together with open source tooling. But then you've got another thing to manage.
Datadog has ~9000 customers. I imagine the respective open-source tools have many more customers than that, which says something about the perceived value of the two approaches. Also, Datadog wraps many tools into one whereas the open-source solutions have singular purposes. It's an apples to oranges comparison.
$15 per server per month isn't that extreme. I've used Datadog in production for 3+ years (starting from a headcount of 10) and can honestly say they've been worth every penny. Observability is irreplacable.
