We performed a comparison between Datadog and Elastic Security (formerly ELK Logstash) based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Datadog and Elastic Security have a similar user rating for ease of deployment, and users of both felt that the solutions were expensive. Users felt Elastic Security took too long to respond when it came to service and support. In terms of features, reviewers of Datadog had a problem with stability and felt there wasn’t enough monitoring through their dashboard. Reviewers of Elastic Security said they had difficulty retrieving data and felt the solution should offer predictive maintenance.
"The most valuable aspects of the product include the APM and profiler."
"By moving to Datadog, we did not need to manage our own monitoring infrastructure anymore."
"Datadog has so far been a breeze to use and set up."
"The most useful feature is the APM."
"Having a wealth of information has helped us investigate outages, and having historical data helps us tune our system."
"I find the greatest feature is being able to search across logs from various microservices."
"Anything I've wanted to do, I found a way to get it done through Datadog."
"Datadog has given us near-live visibility across our entire cloud platform."
"ELK documentation is very good, so never needed to contact technical support."
"What customers found most valuable in Elastic Security feature-wise is the search capability, in particular, the way of writing the search query and the speed of searching for results."
"We like Elastic Security because it's a REST API-based solution. That's the primary reason we use it."
"The product has huge integration varieties available."
"The most valuable feature is the speed, as it responds in a very short time."
"The most valuable feature is the search function, which allows me to go directly to the target to see the specific line a customer is searching for."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the prevention methods and the incident alerts."
"The most valuable thing is that this solution is widely used for work management and research. It's easy to jump into the security use case with the same technology."
"The sheer amount of products that are included can be overwhelming."
"The menu on the left is pretty dense (and I know it has to be). I never knew about the cmd+k functionality until recently. It would be helpful to offer more tips/cheat sheets to see handy shortcuts like that."
"The ability to find what you are looking for when starting out could be improved."
"When it comes to storing the logs with Datadog, I'm not sure why it costs so much to store gigabytes or terabytes of information when it's a fraction of the cost to do so myself."
"I want to applaud the efforts in making the UI extremely usable and approachable. My suggestion would be to take another look at how the menu structure is put together, however. Even after using the platform mostly every day for months, I still find myself trying to find a service or feature in the menus."
"The incident management beta looks promising, but it is still missing the ability to automatically create incidents based on certain alerts."
"It would be ideal if the product offered a bit more monitoring from our dashboard."
"It would also be nice if we had more insight into our own usage of Datadog (agents and custom metrics). They provide a usage page which does help, but it is not in real-time."
"There are connectors to gather logs for Windows PCs and Linux PCs, but if we have to get the logs from Syslog then we have to do it manually, and this should be automated."
"The training that is offered for Elastic is in need of improvement because there is no depth to it."
"They don't provide user authentication and authorisation features (Shield) as a part of their open-source version."
"We're using the open-source edition, for now, I think maybe they can allow their OLED plugin to be open source, as at the moment it is commercialised."
"The solution could offer better reporting features."
"Email notification should be done the same way as Logentries does it."
"I would like more ways to manage permissions and restrict access to certain users."
"Better integration with third-party APMs would be really good."
Datadog is ranked 3rd in Log Management with 137 reviews while Elastic Security is ranked 5th in Log Management with 59 reviews. Datadog is rated 8.6, while Elastic Security is rated 7.6. The top reviewer of Datadog writes "Very good RUM, synthetics, and infrastructure host maps". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Elastic Security writes "A stable and scalable tool that provides visibility along with the consolidation of logs to its users". Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, New Relic, AWS X-Ray and Elastic Observability, whereas Elastic Security is most compared with Wazuh, Splunk Enterprise Security, Microsoft Sentinel, IBM Security QRadar and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. See our Datadog vs. Elastic Security report.
See our list of best Log Management vendors.
We monitor all Log Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
It depends on your requirement. If you are looking for a SIEM/log management solution ELK would be a better option.
But if you are looking for more of a monitoring solution Datadog would be better. Also, Datadog provides out-of-the-box integrations with a lot of cloud applications. ELK could be cost-effective but a bit challenging to configure & finetune.
Datadog: Unify logs, metrics, and traces from across your distributed infrastructure. Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog!
Datadog features offered are:
200+ turn-key integrations for data aggregation
Clean graphs of StatsD and other integrations
Elasticsearch: Open Source, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine. Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine capable of storing data and searching it in near real time. Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats and Logstash are the Elastic Stack (sometimes called the ELK Stack).
Elasticsearch provides the following key features:
Distributed and Highly Available Search Engine.
Multi Tenant with Multi Types.
Various set of APIs including RESTful
Dear,
Unfortunately, I can't say much about Datadog but I have used ELK for a short period.
And I can tell you not everything works the way it should. For example, I noticed heavy CPU usage for a Windows client on MS AD servers. I advise you to consider this if it's important to you.
Good luck!
Where do you want to spend your money, on people or licenses?
ELK requires a long-term investment in engineering resources to manage the system and to provide the capability.
Datadog provides capabilities for you so you only need some administrators. What are the capabilities? Some critical ones include availability, scalability, consuming log files, platform upgrades, ...
If you are consuming smaller data sets (100's of GB) with shorter retention, the size and scaling are much easier making ELK easier.
Do you have admins or engineers? If your team doesn't have dedicated time & skills to spend developing solutions like elastic-alert you should look for a vendor to provide capabilities.
I expect some capabilities in Datadog you will not be able to replicate in ELK.... so that answer makes this obvious.
We are going to evaluate the same for our org. We do about 10 TB a day consumption in ELK and are looking to see if we can shift $$$ from engineers and infra to SaaS.
I have used both ELK and Datadog, and there are lots of variables to consider here. The three important points that I looked at are:
- Cost. In addition to service costs, you have to consider egress and ingress costs as well.
- Real-time observability that you need during development vs long-term Observability. Keep in mind, when you export data over the internet, it comes with the same reliability issues as any other service on the internet. Regardless of how Datadog classifies its service as real-time, it is not real-time, IMO. It very much depends on your definition of real-time.
- Deployment and maintenance complexity. When your ELK cluster grows it has some pain points you need to be aware of.
My general approach is to deploy ELK for development, tune the data, and then pivot toward commercial solutions if I need to. This gives you insight into your data and what you should be preserving and that way you are not paying high costs, when or if you do decide to take advantage of a commercial solution.
Can you tell me what you actually want to do so that I can help you?