Datadog: Cloud Monitoring That Works

What is Datadog?

Essentially, Datadog is a Software-as-a-service solution that serves as focal hub that builds business metrics about you and your business based on information gathered from all your data points. It then displays this information via rather nice graphs, charts and easy to understand rolling timelines. Datadog also uses the information it collects to trigger alerts whenever your compiled metrics reach critically high (or low) levels.

The core of what makes Datadog tick, and sets it apart from the crowd, is the design. The Datadog devs work on the proposition that modern day application monitoring is markedly different from what was going on as recently as 5 years ago.

Good?

Yes. Datadog works, and from what I have seen is impressive. System monitoring of course brings some real advantages. And Datadog does it seamlessly.

The greatest advantage of Datadog is of course the fact that it’s web based, and it’s easy to get going with it. Deploying Datadog took me no time at all, across the 6 machines I have running. It connected easily to my Linux notebook, the Mac, and also the Windows 10 PC. The start-up wizard easily helps you get setup. Installing the agents required to run Datadog across machines and servers etc. was incredibly easy, and it just worked, which is always refreshing.

Once setup, configuring what you want to monitor is pretty straightforward. The biggest obstacle here is probably going to be working out what you actually need to monitor. On a whim, I chose to monitor network throughput and Disk I/O.  Filtering results via the Events section was, I found, to be very intuitive.

The Metrics section was where it was at for me though. Here, Datadog lets you define what graphical options you want to see, and how you want to see it for your managed systems. Sharing the information can also be easily accomplished in the Team section which allows you to filter what information you share, who you share it with, and when it should be shared.

2 key features:

Integrations
One of Datadog’s big strengths is the way it can integrate with various other cloud-based tools and services, such as Amazon Web Services, and GitHub.

Graphing Metrics
The ability to generate graphs, which include real-time data from multiple sources is a very powerful feature. The graphs can be customized to suit the specific needs of your business, and give you the ability to zoom in to focus on specific points of interest, which is nice. 

Downside:

None actually that I can think of. Datadog knows what it does well, and does it very well. For anyone and any business that needs a monitoring solution that doesn’t cost the earth but still does a great job of measuring, monitoring and displaying metrics in fine detail, Datadog is a great choice.

You can get Datadog here.