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Datadog VS RRDTool

Compare Datadog VS RRDTool 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.

RRDTool logo RRDTool

High performance data logging and graphing system for time series 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.

  • RRDTool 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.

RRDTool features and specs

  • Efficient Data Storage
    RRDTool uses a round-robin database structure, which ensures a constant disk footprint by overwriting old data points, making it space efficient.
  • Time Series Data Visualization
    It provides robust graphing capabilities for time series data, making it useful for monitoring trends and patterns over time.
  • Open Source
    Being open-source, RRDTool can be used and modified freely, offering flexibility and customization options to fit specific needs.
  • Built-in Aggregation
    RRDTool automatically consolidates data over time, reducing the need for manual computation and maintaining performance as data scales.
  • Broad Integration
    It is widely supported and can be integrated easily with other tools and systems, such as MRTG and Cacti, enhancing its functionality.

Possible disadvantages of RRDTool

  • Steep Learning Curve
    The tool can be difficult to learn for new users due to its complex command-line interface and diverse set of options.
  • Limited Data Flexibility
    Once a database is created, its size and structure are fixed, meaning changes require a new database setup and could result in data loss.
  • Requires Manual Setup
    There is no automatic data import or setup, requiring users to define configurations and scripts manually, which can be time-consuming.
  • Outdated Interfaces
    The graphical interfaces can appear outdated compared to more modern software, which may not meet current user interface expectations.
  • Performance Limitations
    RRDTool may face performance constraints when dealing with very high-frequency data updates, as it is optimized for a consistent update interval.

Datadog videos

Datadog Review & Walkthrough

More videos:

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

RRDTool videos

Cacti - The RRDTool-based graphing solution

More videos:

  • Review - Building Network Monitoring Systems with RRDtool

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Datadog and RRDTool)
Monitoring Tools
98 98%
2% 2
Log Management
98 98%
2% 2
Time Series Database
0 0%
100% 100
Performance Monitoring
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 and RRDTool

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.

RRDTool Reviews

We have no reviews of RRDTool yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

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

RRDTool mentions (3)

  • Seeing through hardware counters: a journey to threefold performance increase
    For anyone interested in how the graphs were made: https://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/ Happy to see people still using RRD after all these years. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • One of the longest standing soundness holes in Rust -- Diving Deep: implied bounds and variance
    (I actually implemented the firmware for this... Using the Arduino port for ESP8266 because I was impatient, but discovered that either my DHT11 modules are junk or I'm misusing them, because the humidity measurement drifts as they keep running. I need to write the Rust+rrdtool app meant to receive the reports and then do some comparative tests between the DHT11 and some BME280s, and between the current firmware... Source: about 3 years ago
  • Arizona in October is solar bliss
    Nice! This is giving me some ideas. Here's what my old school rrdtool-based system looks like:. Source: over 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

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

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

TimescaleDB - TimescaleDB is a time-series SQL database providing fast analytics, scalability, with automated data management on a proven storage engine.

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

OpenTSDB - OpenTSDB is a distributed, scalable Time Series Database (TSDB) written on top of HBase.

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.

Spanning - Spanning provides data backup and recovery solutions for companies running cloud applications.