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Top 5 DataDog alternatives in 2022

· 6 min read
Ankit Anand

Are you looking for a DataDog alternative? Then you have come to the right place. In this article, we will go through top 5 DataDog alternatives. One of the biggest challenge users face with DataDog is its pricing policies.

Monitor your Go applications with SigNoz

For bigger enterprises it might make sense to shell out huge monitoring bills, but it's often out of question for small and medium size enterprises.

Pricing concerns for DataDog

The space is highly competitive, but there are a few products that stand out. In this article we will go through the best DatDog alternatives which you can explore while selecting your vendor for application monitoring.

List of top DataDog alternatives in 2022:

  • SigNoz
  • New Relic
  • Dynatrace
  • Prometheus
  • LogicMonitor

SigNoz​

The first tool we want to discuss is, of course, SigNoz. SigNoz is a full-stack open-source APM tool, a perfect alternative for DataDog. Logs, metrics, and traces are three important signals needed to set up a robust observability stack. SigNoz provides all three signals under a single pane of glass.

One of the real challenges of using open source tools to set up an observability stack is to stitch together multiple tools like Jaeger for tracing and Prometheus for metrics. SigNoz is an open source APM that provides a SaaS-like experience.

SigNoz is built to support OpenTelemetry natively. OpenTelemetry is quietly becoming the world standard for instrumenting cloud-native applications.

Let us see some of the features of SigNoz.

It comes with out-of-box charts for application metrics like p99 latency, error rates, request per second, and top endpoints.

Application metrics in SigNoz
SigNoz UI showing application overview metrics like RPS, 50th/90th/99th Percentile latencies, and Error Rate

If you found something suspicious in the metric, you can seamlessly move to traces around that time to investigate further.

Seamless transition between metrics and traces
Move from metrics to traces at any point of time which needs more analysis

You can do aggregates on traces to get deeper insights from your application and infrastructure.

Custom aggregates on traces
Run custom aggregates on traces to get deeper application performance insights

SigNoz also provides logs which can be intelligently correlated with traces for quick application debugging.

Logs in SigNoz
With log management, you have everything under a single dashboard to debug application performance issues.

New Relic​

New Relic is one of the oldest companies in this domain and can be a solid DataDog alternative. If you opt for a full user plan, you can get access to all the tools New Relic provides in its observability stack. The list of tools are:
  • Application Monitoring
  • Browser Monitoring
  • Mobile Monitoring
  • Synthetic Monitoring
  • Serverless Monitoring
  • Infrastructure Monitoring
  • Log Management

Standard offering includes plans for teams upto 5 full users. Their pricing depends on the amount of data ingested with 100 GB free data ingest and $0.25 per extra GB. You can visit their pricing page for details.

New Relic dashboard
New Relic Dashboard

Dynatrace​

Dynatrace is a DataDog alternative that provides a broad spectrum of monitoring services aimed at large-scale enterprises. To use Dynatrace, you need to install a single agent per host which will collect all relevant metrics. Dynatrace calls this agent, OneAgent and it can serve the following use-cases for monitoring:
  • Analyze performance of all user requests within your application
  • Monitor server side services
  • Network monitoring
  • Cloud and virtual machines monitoring
  • Monitor containerized environments like Docker, Kubernetes
  • Root-cause analysis

Full-stack monitoring, the Dynatrace product aimed to provide observability for apps, is priced at $69 per month for 8 GB per host if billed annually.

Dynatrace dashboard
Dynatrace dashboard (Source: Dynatrace website)

Prometheus​

Prometheus can serve as a DataDog alternative if you are looking to track only metrics for your applications. It was initially developed at SoundCloud in 2012 before being released as an open-source project. It was the second project to graduate from CNCF after Kubernetes. If you want to opt for an open-source tool for metrics monitoring, then Prometheus can be a good option.

It enables you to capture time-series data as metrics. It's a pull-based monitoring system where the Prometheus server pulls metrics from exporters known as Prometheus targets. Other components in the Prometheus architecture include:

  • A query language known as PromQL is used to query collected time-series data
  • In-built alert manager which is used for managing notifications and silencing
  • Visualization layer, which includes a built-in expression browser

The visualization layer of Prometheus is basic, and it is often used alongside Grafana, an open-source analytics, and visualization tool.

Prometheus Expression Browser
Prometheus expression browser
Grafana used as a visualization layer for Prometheus
Grafana used for visualization with Prometheus

Logicmonitor​

LogicMonitor is a cloud-based infrastructure monitoring platform that can be used as a DataDog alternative if you're looking for infrastructure monitoring. It also provides AIOps features, including root cause analysis, anomaly detection, and forecasting.

With dynamic topology mapping, you can have an overview of your network devices and their inter-dependency. Some of the key monitoring capabilities provided by LogicMonitor are:

  • Cloud Monitoring (AWS, Google and Azure)
  • Container Monitoring (Kubernetes)
  • Network Monitoring
  • Server Monitoring
  • Storage Monitoring
  • Database Monitoring
LogicMonitor dashboard
LogicMonitor Dashboard (Source: LogicMonitor website)

Conclusion​

Monitoring and observability are critical components that you can't ignore for your applications in the production environment. As such, choosing the right tool which can empower you to take actions proactively is very important. Though DataDog is a good tool, it has its own challenges, including cost, unclear pricing policies, and complex UI.

The above DataDog alternatives can be a good option to meet your monitoring needs. A tool like SigNoz can provide you with out of box features like a SaaS vendors while still being open-source.

If you want to check out SigNoz GitHub repo👇

SigNoz GitHub repo

Read more about SigNoz:

Monitor your Spring Boot application with OpenTelemetry and SigNoz

How to set up Golang application performance monitoring with SigNoz