Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Grafana VS Datadog APM

Compare Grafana VS Datadog APM and see what are their differences

Grafana logo Grafana

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

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.
  • Grafana Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-21
  • Datadog APM Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-20

Grafana

$ Details
Release Date
2014 January
Startup details
Country
United States
State
New York
City
New York
Founder(s)
Anthony Woods
Employees
100 - 249

Grafana features and specs

  • Customizable Dashboards
    Grafana provides highly customizable and flexible dashboards, allowing users to create and arrange panels in a way that best represents their metrics and data.
  • Wide Range of Data Sources
    Grafana supports numerous data sources including Prometheus, Elasticsearch, Graphite, AWS CloudWatch, and more, making it versatile and adaptable to various data environments.
  • Rich Plugin Ecosystem
    The platform offers a rich ecosystem of plugins for data visualization, data sources, and apps, enabling users to extend its functionality to suit specific needs.
  • Open Source
    As an open-source tool, Grafana is free to use and customize, allowing organizations to tailor it to their specific requirements without licensing costs.
  • Alerting System
    Grafana comes with a powerful alerting system that can notify users about important events through various channels like email, Slack, and PagerDuty.
  • Community and Support
    Grafana has a large and active community, providing extensive documentation, forums, and tutorials to help users solve issues and improve their dashboards.

Possible disadvantages of Grafana

  • Learning Curve
    The extensive customization features and numerous data sources can be overwhelming for new users, leading to a steep learning curve.
  • Performance Issues with Large Datasets
    When dealing with very large datasets or high-cardinality data, performance issues can arise, requiring additional tuning or more powerful infrastructure.
  • Limited Built-in Data Storage
    Grafana itself does not store data; it relies on external data sources. This could necessitate using additional services or infrastructure for data storage.
  • Complex Setup for Alerting
    Setting up and managing the alerting system can be complicated, especially for users who are not familiar with monitoring and alerting concepts.
  • Dependence on External Data Sources
    The effectiveness of Grafana depends heavily on the quality and stability of the external data sources it connects to, which can be a point of failure.
  • Cost for Enterprise Features
    While the open-source version is free, advanced features and support are available only in the paid enterprise version, which could be costly for some organizations.

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.

Grafana videos

Grafana vs Kibana | Beautiful data graphs and log analysis systems

More videos:

  • Review - Business Dashboards with Grafana and MySQL
  • Review - Grafana Labs 2019 Year in Review

Datadog APM videos

Setup Datadog APM in One Minute

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Grafana and Datadog APM)
Monitoring Tools
95 95%
5% 5
Data Dashboard
100 100%
0% 0
Tool
0 0%
100% 100
Log Management
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 Grafana and Datadog APM

Grafana Reviews

Self Hosting Like Its 2025
If you’re looking for straightforward monitoring and the thought of setting up a full Zabbix or Grafana stack seems daunting, this software is a real lifesaver. With just one deployment, you can monitor your services and receive notifications through a wide variety of channels including…
Source: kiranet.org
Top 10 Grafana Alternatives in 2024
Middleware is one such Grafana alternative that offers robust data monitoring and visualization capabilities at affordable prices. Though it’s commercial, unlike Grafana, its rich feature set ensures accommodating your present and future business needs.
Source: middleware.io
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Are you looking for Grafana alternatives? Then you have come to the right place. Grafana started as a data visualization tool. It slowly evolved into a tool that can take data from multiple data sources for visualization. For observability, Grafana offers the LGTM stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics). You need to configure...
Source: signoz.io
10 Best Grafana Alternatives [2023 Comparison]
For this reason, many have set out in search of Grafana alternatives. Since you’ve landed yourself here, I’m guessing that you’re one of those people. Fear not! We’ve put together a comprehensive list of the 10 best Grafana alternatives out there today.
Source: sematext.com
Top 10 Tableau Open Source Alternatives: A Comprehensive List
When it comes to visualization, Grafana is a great tool for visualizing time series data with support for various databases including Prometheus, InfluxDB, and Graphite. It is also compatible with relational databases such as MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. While Tableau can do the same thing, Grafana’s open-source status allows the users to add additional data sources and...
Source: hevodata.com

Datadog APM Reviews

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

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Grafana seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 238 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.

Grafana mentions (238)

  • Send Node.js logs from Docker to Grafana Cloud with Alloy
    Navigate to Grafana Cloud and sign up or log in. In the sidebar, select Connections → Add new connection, select Loki. This is the place that prompts you to set up your Loki connection and allows you to generate an access token for Alloy. - Source: dev.to / 4 days ago
  • Monitoring API Requests and Responses for System Health
    Prometheus + Grafana: Open-source tools that offer maximum flexibility without ongoing licensing costs—ideal for teams willing to manage their own infrastructure and configuration. - Source: dev.to / 7 days ago
  • How to Optimize Your Fintech API in 2025: A Guide
    Prometheus: This open-source monitoring solution pairs with Grafana for powerful custom visualization of exactly what matters to your business. - Source: dev.to / 7 days ago
  • Monitoring Docker Hub limits with Prometheus
    Grafana Is used to visualize metrics, logs, traces, and by the time you read this probably other things 😄. - Source: dev.to / 9 days ago
  • 3 Types of Chaos Experiments and How To Run Them
    Utilize monitoring solutions like Prometheus, Grafana, or Datadog to monitor how services communicate under normal and failure conditions. Service meshes like Istio or Linkerd can provide detailed insights without changing your application code. - Source: dev.to / 11 days ago
View more

Datadog APM mentions (0)

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

What are some alternatives?

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

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

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

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.

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

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

Sematext - Troubleshooting just got easier.