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Datadog APM VS Prometheus

Compare Datadog APM VS Prometheus and see what are their differences

Datadog APM logo Datadog APM

Datadog APM is one of the powerful tools that allows deep visibility into your application with out-of-the-box performance dashboards for web services, queues, and databases to observe requests, errors, or latency.

Prometheus logo Prometheus

An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.
  • Datadog APM Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-20
  • Prometheus Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-13

Datadog APM features and specs

  • Comprehensive Monitoring
    Datadog APM provides end-to-end visibility into application performance, monitoring everything from front-end services to back-end queues. This ensures that users can identify and address issues at any layer of the application stack.
  • Unified Platform
    It integrates seamlessly with other Datadog products. This unified approach allows users to correlate data across logs, metrics, and resources, enabling more efficient troubleshooting and performance optimization.
  • Scalability
    Datadog APM is designed to scale effortlessly with growing data and traffic, making it suitable for organizations of various sizes and industries.
  • Real-time Monitoring and Alerts
    Provides real-time performance monitoring with customizable alerting capabilities, allowing teams to respond quickly to potential performance degradation or outages.
  • Broad Integration Support
    Supports a wide range of integrations with popular cloud providers, platforms, frameworks, and third-party tools, allowing for greater flexibility and ease of implementation in diverse IT environments.

Possible disadvantages of Datadog APM

  • Pricing Complexity
    Datadog's pricing model can become complex and potentially expensive, especially for organizations that scale their usage or require numerous integrations and extended features.
  • Learning Curve
    For new users or smaller teams, there may be a substantial learning curve due to its extensive features and capabilities. Time and effort are required to fully leverage the platform's potential.
  • Data Storage Limitations
    Retention periods for APM data may be limited, which could necessitate additional solutions or costs if long-term data storage is required for compliance or extended analysis purposes.
  • Complex Setup
    Initial implementation and configuration can be complex, especially for organizations with unique or intricate IT environments. It may require dedicated time and resources to achieve optimal setup.
  • Resource Intensive
    Datadog APM agents can be resource-intensive, and depending on the application's architecture, may impact system performance on monitored hosts.

Prometheus features and specs

  • Powerful Query Language
    Prometheus uses PromQL, a flexible and powerful query language that allows for complex and detailed queries.
  • Dimensional Data Model
    Prometheus employs a multidimensional data model with time series data identified by metric name and key-value pairs, offering great flexibility in data organization.
  • Auto-Discovery
    It supports service discovery mechanisms to automatically locate and scrape metrics from jobs, simplifying the monitoring process.
  • Alerting
    Prometheus includes built-in alerting capabilities that allow you to trigger alerts based on PromQL queries, which can be integrated with different alert management systems.
  • Scalability
    Its architecture, which uses independent single servers, scales well, allowing you to handle a large number of time series efficiently.
  • Open Source
    Prometheus is open-source and supported by a large community, offering transparency, regular updates, and numerous integrations.
  • Easy Integration
    Thanks to its compatibility with various data exporting standards and a myriad of existing exporters, integrating Prometheus into existing systems is streamlined.

Possible disadvantages of Prometheus

  • Single Points of Failure
    Prometheus instances operate independently, meaning that if a server goes down, the metrics it monitored will be unavailable unless replicated manually.
  • Storage Overhead
    Prometheus can consume significant storage, especially for high-resolution time series data, which might necessitate careful planning and management.
  • Limited Long-Term Storage
    By default, Prometheus is not designed for long-term storage of metrics and may require integration with other systems like Thanos or Cortex for this purpose.
  • Complexity for Beginners
    The sheer number of features and the complexities associated with PromQL can present a steep learning curve for newcomers.
  • Scaling Write Operations
    In high-scale environments, write operations might become a bottleneck due to the single-server nature of the Prometheus architecture.
  • Lack of Native High Availability
    While Prometheus supports running multiple instances, it does not provide built-in high availability features out-of-the-box, necessitating additional configurations.
  • No Built-in Authentication and Authorization
    Prometheus lacks native support for secure authentication and authorization, which means these features must be externally managed.

Datadog APM videos

Setup Datadog APM in One Minute

Prometheus videos

How Prometheus Monitoring works | Prometheus Architecture explained

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Datadog APM and Prometheus)
Monitoring Tools
4 4%
96% 96
Tool
100 100%
0% 0
Log Management
0 0%
100% 100
Business & Commerce
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Datadog APM and Prometheus

Datadog APM Reviews

We have no reviews of Datadog APM yet.
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Prometheus Reviews

The 10 Best Nagios Alternatives in 2024 (Paid and Open-source)
The 10 Best Prometheus Alternatives 2024 Prometheus is one of the most well-known open-source monitoring tools out there. But is it right for you? Check out these Prometheus alternatives to find out.
Source: betterstack.com
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Under the hood, Grafana is powered by multiple tools like Loki, Tempo, Mimir & Prometheus. SigNoz is built as a single tool to serve logs, metrics, and traces in a single pane of glass. SigNoz uses a single datastore - ClickHouse to power its observability stack. This makes SigNoz much better in correlating signals and driving better insights.
Source: signoz.io
GCP Managed Service For Prometheus vs. Levitate | Last9
Levitate is up to 30X cost-efficient compared with Google Managed Prometheus. This is possible because of warehousing capabilities such as data tiering, streaming aggregations, and cardinality controls, making it a much superior choice to Google Managed Prometheus.
Source: last9.io
The Best Open Source Network Monitoring Tools in 2023
Description: Prometheus is an open source monitoring solution focused on data collection and analysis. It allows users to set up network monitoring capabilities using the native toolset. The tool is able to collect information on devices using SNMP pings and examine network bandwidth usage from the device perspective, among other functinos. The PromQL system analyzes data...
10 Best Linux Monitoring Tools and Software to Improve Server Performance [2022 Comparison]
Prometheus and Grafana are used together as an open-source monitoring and alerting solution with support for Linux servers. Prometheus mainly collects the Linux hardware and OS metrics exposed by *nix kernel and then stores as time-series data, using a pull model over HTTP. You can find metrics information in a multi-dimensional data model of the timestamped metrics (i.e.,...
Source: sematext.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Prometheus seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 272 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Datadog APM mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Datadog APM yet. Tracking of Datadog APM recommendations started around Aug 2021.

Prometheus mentions (272)

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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Datadog APM and Prometheus, you can also consider the following products

Netflow Network Forensics - Netflow Network Forensics is an application monitoring tool that monitors packets and analyzes traffic activity for intrusion or malware detection.

Grafana - Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases

eG Enterprise - From application performance to user experience to infrastructure usage, get performance answers from a single console. Troubleshoot fast with actionable insights.

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

Sematext - Troubleshooting just got easier.

Zabbix - Track, record, alert and visualize performance and availability of IT resources