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Datadog VS Fluentd

Compare Datadog VS Fluentd and see what are their differences

Datadog logo 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.

Fluentd logo Fluentd

Fluentd is a cross platform open source data collection solution originally developed at Treasure Data.
  • Datadog Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-05

Datadog is a monitoring and analytics platform for cloud-scale application infrastructure. Combining metrics from servers, databases, and applications, Datadog delivers sophisticated, actionable alerts, and provides real-time visibility of your entire infrastructure. Datadog includes 100+ vendor-supported, prebuilt integrations and monitors hundreds of thousands of hosts.

  • Fluentd Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-30

Datadog features and specs

  • Comprehensive Monitoring
    Datadog offers a wide range of monitoring capabilities including infrastructure, application performance, log management, and user experience monitoring. This provides a unified view across the entire tech stack.
  • Integration Ecosystem
    With over 400 integrations available, Datadog can easily connect with virtually any service, application, and technology stack, making it highly versatile.
  • Scalability
    Datadog is designed to scale from small startups to large enterprises, providing functionalities that cater to varied sizes and complexities of operations.
  • Real-Time Data
    The platform provides real-time data and analytics, which is crucial for diagnosing and troubleshooting issues as they arise.
  • Alerting and Notifications
    Advanced alerting and notification features allow users to set up custom alerts based on metrics, enabling proactive problem resolution.
  • User-Friendly Interface
    The user interface is intuitive and easy to navigate, even for those who are not particularly technical, making it accessible to a broader range of users.
  • Security Features
    Datadog includes various security features such as compliance tracking, threat detection, and anomaly detection, enhancing overall security posture.

Possible disadvantages of Datadog

  • Cost
    Datadog can become quite expensive, especially as the volume of monitored data and the number of integrations increases. This can be a limiting factor for smaller businesses.
  • Complexity
    With its extensive feature set, Datadog can be overwhelming for new users, requiring a steep learning curve to master all functionalities.
  • Data Retention
    The default data retention period is often shorter than what some organizations require, leading to additional costs for longer retention.
  • Performance Overhead
    The extensive data collection and monitoring capabilities can add performance overhead to the monitored systems, potentially impacting their performance.
  • Customization Limitations
    While Datadog provides extensive dashboards and visualizations, some users find the customization options to be limited compared to other monitoring solutions.
  • Support
    Some users have reported that the customer support can be slow or insufficient at times, which could be a downside when facing critical issues.

Fluentd features and specs

  • Open Source
    Fluentd is an open-source data collector, meaning it is free to use and has a large community of contributors and users who can provide support and plugins.
  • Unified Logging Layer
    It provides a unified logging layer that can collect, filter, and distribute logs from various sources to various destinations, simplifying log management.
  • Extensibility
    Fluentd supports a wide range of plugins for inputs, outputs, filters, and parsers, making it highly extensible and customizable to fit specific needs.
  • High Performance
    It is designed to be high-performance and can handle large volumes of logs efficiently, which is crucial for enterprise environments.
  • Flexible Configuration
    Fluentd offers flexible and straightforward configuration, allowing users to define complex data pipelines with relative ease.
  • Support for Multiple Environments
    Fluentd supports cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments, making it versatile for various deployment scenarios.

Possible disadvantages of Fluentd

  • Complexity
    The flexibility and extensibility of Fluentd can introduce complexity, requiring a steep learning curve for new users to master the tool.
  • Resource Intensive
    Fluentd can be resource-intensive, especially when dealing with large volumes of data, which may require robust infrastructure.
  • Plugin Compatibility
    While there are many plugins available, not all of them are always up-to-date or compatible with the latest versions of Fluentd, potentially causing integration issues.
  • Maintenance Overhead
    Managing Fluentd involves continuous monitoring, updating, and maintenance to ensure optimal performance and security, which could be resource-draining.
  • Documentation Gaps
    Although there is extensive documentation, some users report that it lacks deep insights and examples for advanced configurations, requiring additional research and community support.

Datadog videos

Datadog Review & Walkthrough

More videos:

  • Review - DataDog: What it is and where its going
  • Review - Datadog: 2-Minute Tour

Fluentd videos

How-to Ship Logs to Grafana Loki with Promtail, FluentD & Fluent-bit

More videos:

  • Review - OpenShift Commons Briefing #72: Cloud Native Logging with Fluentd
  • Review - Fluentd, the Open Source Data Collection tool

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Datadog and Fluentd)
Monitoring Tools
91 91%
9% 9
Log Management
88 88%
12% 12
Performance Monitoring
Security & Privacy
0 0%
100% 100

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 and Fluentd

Datadog Reviews

The 10 Best Nagios Alternatives in 2024 (Paid and Open-source)
10 Best Datadog Alternatives to Consider in 2023 Datadog is one of the most potent and versatile players on the market, but they have their fair share of downsides. The monitoring and observability space is quite competitive, so we will discuss 10 of the best Datadog alternatives and compare their pros and cons to determine which is better suited for your needs.
Source: betterstack.com
Top 10 Grafana Alternatives in 2024
While all Grafana alternatives do not offer pricing transparency, go for a flexible pricing structure that fits your budget. Tools like Datadog offer pricing based on data volume or monitoring scope, while Middleware offers a flexible pay-as-you-go pricing structure.
Source: middleware.io
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Open Source vs. Proprietary: Determine whether an open-source solution like SigNoz or a proprietary one like Datadog better aligns with your requirements and budget. Open-source tools often offer more customization and community support, while proprietary tools may provide more comprehensive out-of-the-box features and dedicated customer service. At SigNoz, we offer both...
Source: signoz.io
10 Best Grafana Alternatives [2023 Comparison]
Datadog is a massive tool that offers a lot of features and solutions, including log management. But before we dive too deep, please note that Datadog is expensive. It absolutely is not for anyone other than large-budgeted corporations. Just take a look at what people are saying on X.
Source: sematext.com
5 Best DevSecOps Tools in 2023
There are many platforms that can be utilized for monitoring and alerting. Some examples are New Relic, Datadog, AWS CloudWatch, Sentry, Dynatrace, and others. Again, these providers each have pros and cons related to pricing, offering, ad vendor lock-in. So research the options to see what may possibly be best for a given situation.

Fluentd Reviews

11 Best Splunk Alternatives
The CloudFront-log plugin, for example, can be used to ingest logs from Amazon CloudFront, while the elasticsearch plugin can be used to route logs to Elasticsearch. Fluentd only provides ingestion and routing services, so you'll have to develop your log management solution from the ground up. Fluentd has become a popular alternative to Logstash, transforming ELK into EFK....
Top 15 Kafka Alternatives Popular In 2021
Inputs and outputs have inbuilt support to buffer, load balance, timeout and retry instances. It has a unified logging layer in between the data sources. There are over 5000+ companies that rely on Fluentd and approximately collect logs from over 50000+ servers. It scraps logs from sources and sends them across to services like object storage, Elasticsearch, etc. it is...
Best Log Management Tools: Useful Tools for Log Management, Monitoring, Analytics, and More
Fluentd collects events from various data sources and writes them to files, RDBMS, NoSQL, IaaS, SaaS, Hadoop and so on. Fluentd helps you unify your logging infrastructure. Fluentd’s flagship feature is an extensive library of plugins which provide extended support and functionality for anything related to log and data management within a concise developer environment.
Source: stackify.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Datadog seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 5 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 mentions (5)

  • Send the logs of your Shuttle-powered backend to Datadog
    Ideally, if we had access to the underlying infrastructure, we could probably install the Datadog Agent and configure it to send our logs directly to Datadog, or even use AWS Lambda functions or Azure Event Hub + Azure Functions in case we were facing some specific cloud scenarios. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • I wanted a self hosted alternative to Atlassian status page so I build my own application !
    Currently supported : Datadog, Jenkins, DNS, HTTP. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Datadog on Kubernetes: Avoiding Common Pitfalls
    Datadog is a powerful monitoring and security platform that gives you visibility into end-to-end traces, application metrics, logs, and infrastructure. While Datadog has great documentation on their Kubernetes integration, we've observed that there's some missed nuance that leads to common pitfalls. - Source: dev.to / almost 4 years ago
  • Post-DockerCon spam
    .. Is to see you email address being silently distributed to every single company that I've watched a talk from. And now suddenly get several promotional spam emails per day from some 4-5 different domains like instana.com, datadoghq.com, snyk.io, cockroachlabs.com (some of them send even multiple emails per day!). Source: almost 4 years ago
  • Never write a UserService again
    We're commonly doing this with logging, using services such as Loggly or DataDog. We're using managed databases, be it on AWS, Heroku or database-vendor-specific solutions. We're storing binaries on S3. Externalising user authentication and authorization might be a good candidate as well. - Source: dev.to / about 4 years ago

Fluentd mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Fluentd yet. Tracking of Fluentd recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

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

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

logstash - logstash is a tool for managing events and logs.

Dynatrace - Cloud-based quality testing, performance monitoring and analytics for mobile apps and websites. Get started with Keynote today!

rsyslog - Rsyslog is an enhanced syslogd supporting, among others, MySQL, PostgreSQL, failover log...

NewRelic - New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them.

Graylog - Graylog is an open source log management platform for collecting, indexing, and analyzing both structured and unstructured data.