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Datadog VS Papertrail

Compare Datadog VS Papertrail 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.

Papertrail logo Papertrail

Frustration-free log management. Get started in seconds.
  • 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.

  • Papertrail Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-11

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.

Papertrail features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    Papertrail offers an intuitive interface that makes it easy for users to set up and start logging without a steep learning curve.
  • Real-time Monitoring
    It provides real-time log aggregation and monitoring, which is crucial for quick troubleshooting and response.
  • Seamless Integration
    Supports a wide range of integrations with other tools and services, making it versatile in various tech stacks.
  • Search and Filtering
    Offers powerful search and filtering capabilities that allow users to quickly find relevant logs.
  • Alerting
    Includes built-in alerting mechanisms to notify users of critical events, helping to ensure timely responses to issues.
  • Scalability
    Designed to handle large volumes of logs, making it suitable for both small and large applications.
  • Secure
    Provides strong security measures such as encrypted log transmissions and compliance with industry standards.

Possible disadvantages of Papertrail

  • Cost
    Can be relatively expensive for small teams or projects with limited budgets due to its pricing structure.
  • Limited Retention
    Basic plans have limited log retention periods, which might not be sufficient for all use cases.
  • Advanced Features
    Some advanced features and functionalities are only available in higher-tier plans, limiting access for users on basic plans.
  • Dependency on Network
    Being a cloud-based solution, it requires a stable internet connection, which can be a bottleneck in certain environments.

Analysis of Datadog

Overall verdict

  • Datadog is generally considered a good choice for organizations needing a comprehensive monitoring solution that provides deep insights across various aspects of their technology stack. Its scalability and integration capabilities make it appealing for businesses of all sizes, especially those leveraging cloud services.

Why this product is good

  • Datadog is a powerful monitoring and analytics platform that provides comprehensive visibility into cloud-scale applications. It's known for its robust set of features, including infrastructure monitoring, application performance management, log management, and security monitoring. Datadog's ability to integrate with a vast array of services and technologies makes it a versatile tool for organizations looking to monitor complex systems. Furthermore, its real-time dashboards and alerting capabilities help teams quickly identify and address performance issues, improving reliability and efficiency.

Recommended for

  • Organizations using multiple cloud services and wanting unified monitoring.
  • IT teams looking for a detailed application performance management solution.
  • Businesses that require scalable monitoring for dynamic environments.
  • Companies seeking robust alerting and automation capabilities for infrastructure and application management.

Analysis of Papertrail

Overall verdict

  • Overall, Papertrail is a strong option for organizations seeking an intuitive and robust log management solution, particularly if they prioritize ease of use and integration capabilities. It is highly regarded for its performance, reliability, and user-friendly features.

Why this product is good

  • Papertrail is considered a good choice because it provides real-time log management and monitoring, making it easier for users to diagnose and debug application issues quickly. It offers a simple and efficient interface, supports multiple log formats, and integrates well with a variety of services. Users appreciate the ability to search, filter, and alert on log data with ease, which helps in maintaining operational visibility and ensuring system reliability.

Recommended for

  • Small to medium-sized businesses looking for an affordable log management solution
  • Development and DevOps teams needing real-time log monitoring and alerting
  • Organizations that utilize cloud services and require seamless integration
  • IT administrators and engineers who value a straightforward, easy-to-navigate interface

Datadog videos

Datadog Review & Walkthrough

More videos:

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

Papertrail videos

No Papertrail videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Datadog and Papertrail)
Monitoring Tools
93 93%
7% 7
Log Management
90 90%
10% 10
Performance Monitoring
100 100%
0% 0
Machine Data Analytics
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 Papertrail

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.

Papertrail Reviews

Best Log Management Tools for Elixir Phoenix
Papertrail is a solid choice that has been around for a while. We’ve used it in production for years and it met our needs. It is easy to set up with Gigalixir. With Heroku, it is a one-click add-on. Some of the product reviews we found said it can become expensive as you scale, especially compared to some of our other options. Papertrail is the best for Heroku apps.
Source: staknine.com
Top 21 Log Management Software Tools
Papertrail is a log management service that takes care of aggregating, searching, and analyzing any type of log files, system logs, or basic text log files. Its real-time features allow for developers and engineers to monitor live happenings for apps and servers as they are happening. Papertrail offers seamless integration with services like Slack, Librato and Email to help...
The Best 21 Sharepoint Alternatives in 2019
Among its many features, Papertrail has many capturing solutions. This is the dynamic answer to minimize the amount of documents you keep in printed form.
Best Log Management Tools: Useful Tools for Log Management, Monitoring, Analytics, and More
Papertrail is a snazzy hosted log management tool that takes care of aggregating, searching, and analyzing any type of log files, system logs, or basic text log files. Its real-time features allow for developers and engineers to monitor live happenings for apps and servers as they are happening. Papertrail offers seamless integration with services like Slack, Librato and...
Source: stackify.com

Social recommendations and mentions

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

Papertrail mentions (2)

  • Ask HN: How do you handle observability and alerting at tiny companies?
    I like http://papertrail.com; it’s super easy to integrate with any backend, offers alerts, and much more. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • What's a software you searched to selfhost but is still missing to you ?
    I'd love a papertrail.com alternative that doesn't require a metric ass ton of knowledge and experience to set up. And, yes, that is a shot at every open-source, self-hosted graphical syslog tool currently available. Source: about 2 years ago

What are some alternatives?

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

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

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

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

Splunk - Splunk's operational intelligence platform helps unearth intelligent insights from machine data.

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.

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