Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Datadog VS Google StackDriver

Compare Datadog VS Google StackDriver 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.

Google StackDriver logo Google StackDriver

Stackdriver provides monitoring services for cloud-powered applications.
  • 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.

  • Google StackDriver Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-11

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.

Google StackDriver features and specs

  • Comprehensive Monitoring
    Google StackDriver provides extensive monitoring capabilities for applications running on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), and even on-premises systems. This centralized monitoring offers seamless integration and a unified view of the health of your entire infrastructure.
  • Integrated Logging
    StackDriver includes powerful logging capabilities that allow you to collect, analyze, and visualize logs from various sources. Its integration with Google Cloud Logging allows for easy search, alerting, and insights.
  • Alerting and Incident Response
    StackDriver comes with advanced alerting features that notify you of any issues in real-time. It supports multiple channels like email, SMS, and third-party services, helping you respond proactively to incidents.
  • Auto-Generated Dashboards
    StackDriver provides auto-generated dashboards for various GCP and AWS services, making it easier for users to start monitoring their cloud resources immediately without extensive configuration.
  • Integration with Other Google Services
    Being a part of Google Cloud, StackDriver seamlessly integrates with other Google services such as BigQuery, Cloud Storage, and Google Kubernetes Engine, among others, providing more robust data analysis and visualization capabilities.

Possible disadvantages of Google StackDriver

  • Cost
    The pricing for StackDriver can become expensive, especially for large-scale applications with a significant number of resources and logs. Costs can quickly escalate based on usage, making budgeting a challenge.
  • Complexity
    While StackDriver offers a comprehensive set of features, the platform can be complex to set up and configure correctly, particularly for newcomers or smaller teams without dedicated DevOps resources.
  • AWS Integration Limitations
    Although StackDriver supports AWS, the integration is not as deep as it is with GCP. Some advanced features and metrics may not be available for AWS resources, limiting its effectiveness for multi-cloud environments.
  • Learning Curve
    The extensive functionality of StackDriver comes with a steep learning curve. Users may require significant time and training to fully leverage all the features and to set up effective monitoring and alerting systems.
  • Data Retention Limitations
    StackDriver's data retention policies might be restrictive for some use cases. By default, log data retention is limited, and extending the retention period can incur additional costs, affecting long-term analysis and auditing.

Datadog videos

Datadog Review & Walkthrough

More videos:

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

Google StackDriver videos

Google Stackdriver Monitoring | Walkthrough, Thoughts, and Review

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Datadog and Google StackDriver)
Monitoring Tools
93 93%
7% 7
Log Management
92 92%
8% 8
Performance Monitoring
100 100%
0% 0
Business & Commerce
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 Google StackDriver

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.

Google StackDriver Reviews

We have no reviews of Google StackDriver yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Datadog should be more popular than Google StackDriver. 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

Google StackDriver mentions (1)

  • 10 Best Cloud Monitoring Tools for 2025
    Formerly Stackdriver, Google Cloud Operations Suite offers monitoring, logging, and diagnostics for applications on Google Cloud Platform. It provides real-time insights and integrates seamlessly with other Google Cloud services. - Source: dev.to / 3 days ago

What are some alternatives?

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

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

Devo - Devo delivers real-time operational & business value from analytics on streaming and historical data to operations.

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

Komodor - The Kubernetes native troubleshooting platform

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.

ALog ConVerter - Server access log solution for finance and manufacturing