Datadog vs. SolarWinds Loggly

A one-stop solution for everything you need. Multiple functionalities are tailored to meet specific business needs. Logs are essential for any business, and Datadog manages logs effectively. Rum sessions are something new to me and have given us a new perspective on how to reverse engineer issues that we see for our customers.

Incentivized

SolarWinds Loggly is great for capturing and organizing logs from 3rd party sources such as NGINX. Without SolarWinds Loggly it's really difficult to manage the logs overtime, find traffic patterns, and identify issues before they become a problem. Anyone who is routinely searching through massive log files could quickly benefit from the SolarWinds Loggly and it's capabilities.

Incentivized

• Create Dashboards as per application, environments, and Custom metrics in one panel.
• Log aggregation, one-stop Application monitoring tools for the whole infrastructure.
• Playbooks, SLA definition, success and error quotas, request visualizations.
• DB monitoring, Serverless stack monitoring.
• Alerting of Production incidents so we can quickly resolve the issues on time.

Incentivized

• Modern: Loggly is modern: Dashboards, realtime information and the ability speak many different data sources and environments makes it an attractive choice
• Configurability: Loggly gets log parsing right: by allowing you to in real time- filtering of log data, tagging and identifying data sources
• DevOps friendly: Loggly is very Componentized: You can have an instance of Loggly running that will Monitor your Linux instance, in addition to all of it's services, as an example. Also, you can start/stop Loggly, without affecting your other components

Incentivized

• Alert windows cause lag in notifications (e.g. if the alert window is X errors in 1 hour, we won't get alerted until the end of the 1 hour range)
• I would appreciate more supportive examples for how to filter and view metrics in the explorer
• I would like a more clear interface for metrics that are missing in a time frame, rather than only showing tags/etc. for metrics that were collected within the currently viewed time frame

Incentivized

• Once the logging limit is exceeded, there are no logs period. Unexpectedly noisy logs often correlate with services misbehaving and potentially leading to disruption. An outage is an awful time to lose visibility into the entire system of apps. Some ways to bridge this gap would be appreciated.
• Filtering by tags is not intuitive in the web interface. You may believe that you are performing the same search and filter as last time since the tags entered are the same, however, this is often not the case. The reliable way to know that you have the same filter is to bookmark the URL. This lack of ease in usability results in devs using Loggly less than they could and implementing logs less effectively during development time (since they don't consider themselves likely to view them anyway).
• Would like to see a way to onboard our less experienced devs to using Loggly effectively.

Incentivized

Management is not open to having an agent sending the data to the cloud instance.

Incentivized

Datadog's user interface is quite friendly and easy to navigate. With menus clearly categorized, and ability to bookmark important dashboards, one can easily find what they're looking for. For dashboards, ability to move and resize visualizations and group them, is really helpful to organize dashboards. Automatic suggestions from Datadog for important visualizations based on the metrics and logs would provide another level of ease of use.

Incentivized

Loggly's easy setup, very good customer support, and intuitive interface make Loggly very easy to use. User access management is also very easy as we can tailor the experience for each of our developers to access the information they need without having to wade through other information. While there was a slight learning curve in how to view the logs the way some specifically wanted, everything was possible and quite easy to do.

Incentivized

The support team usually gets it right. We did have a rather complicate issue setting up monitoring on a domain controller. However, they are usually responsive and helpful over chat. The downside would be I don’t think they have any phone support. If that is important to you this might not be a good fit.

Incentivized

The support team have been great when we have logged tickets or had issues, most of the time it is down to user training, however we have had a couple of bugs that they have been able to iron out for us.

Incentivized

It has good architecture, which focus on ese of use.

Incentivized

I selected Datadog because of its features and the wide range of integration support. As I already told it supports more that 600+ integrations which helps and organization to keep everything in a single place and also its AI feature which is reducing the time for root cause analysis. Its custom dashboards features which helps us to visualize the data in a more attractive way.

Incentivized

I actually couldn't get anybody from Datadog to engage with me, the main problem we had was that our devices couldn't connect to an encrypted port, but we didn't want to send our logs in plain text over the internet. We implemented an on-net log aggregator which then connects to Loggly over encrypted UDP. In theory Loggly made this particularly easy providing configuration snippets for most of the common log services (e.g. rSyslog, syslog-ng). Unfortunately the documentation was out of date and none of the provided configs worked, fortunately they were close enough that combined with our own syslog-ng experience we were able to get it up and going relatively painlessly. The choice then of going with Loggly, backed by an industry favourite in Solarwinds was a no brainer.

Incentivized

• Saved us (time & money) from developing our own monitoring utilities that would pale in comparison
• Alerts allow us to remedy issues before our customers even know about them
• Tracking resource usage over time allows us to better plan for future needs, before it becomes a pain-point.

Incentivized

• Loggly has alerted us to several bugs, ranging from major to small to "would have been a major problem under load."
• It's great having our disparate logs collected and the alerts we have set up around them let us know recently that somebody used an incorrect document to generate a mass email. Users were trying to log in with the link provided but getting 401s and I have an alert configured to tell me about high numbers of 4xx errors.
• Metrics and alerts around metrics have given us peace of mind that automated fulfillment systems aren't going off the rails and costing us hundreds of dollars.

Incentivized