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.
"Excellent autocomplete for everything in the UI."
"The network map is crucial in identifying bottlenecks and determining what needs more attention."
"I have found some of the most valuable features to be the way things all come together that gives us a point of view that is useful. The panel is very beautiful and customizable."
"Most of the features in the way Datadog does monitoring are commendable and that is the reason we choose it. We did some comparisons before picking Datadog. Datadog was recommended based on the features provided."
"Anything I've wanted to do, I found a way to get it done through Datadog."
"I have found the logging and tracing features the most valuable."
"The visibility into our network has allowed for quick diagnosis of failures, identification of underutilized or over-utilized resources, and allowed for cloud cost optimization opportunities."
"Having a clear view, not only of our infrastructure but our apps and services as well, has brought a great added value to our customers."
"ELK is open-source, and it will give you the framework you need to build everything from scratch."
"It is very quick to react. I can set it to check anomalies or suspicious behavior every 30 seconds. It is very fast."
"It's not very complicated to install Elastic."
"Its flexibility is most valuable. We can have a number of scenarios, and we can get logs from anything. If we know how to use Logstash, we can tweak it in many ways. This makes the logging search on Elastic very easy."
"The indexes allow you to get your results quickly. The filtering and log passing is the advantage of Logstash."
"It is an extremely stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"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."
"The product has huge integration varieties available."
"Datadog has a lot of documentation, but a lot of that documentation assumes you know how the service works, which can lead to confusion."
"Managing dashboards as IaC is a bit hard to work out at times."
"Some of the interface is still confusing to use."
"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."
"It would be ideal if the product offered a bit more monitoring from our dashboard."
"The documentation leaves a lot to be desired for new users."
"This service could be less costly."
"They need to implement template variables into the message response body."
"The solution could offer better reporting features."
"We'd like to see some more artificial intelligence capabilities."
"Authentication is not a default in Kibana. We need to have another tool to have authentication and authorization. These two should be part of Kibana."
"This type of monitoring is not very mature just yet. We need more real-time information in a way that's easier to manage."
"If the documentation were improved and made more clear for beginners, or even professionals, then we would be more attracted to this solution."
"The solution could also use better dashboards. They need to be more graphical, more matrix-like."
"The price of this product could be improved, especially the additional costs. I would also like to see better-quality graphics."
"It could use maybe a little more on the Linux side."
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?