LogicMonitor Vs Datadog

Performance monitoring services have become essential for any business even though they form an expense that does not feed directly into core activities. If the IT system has problems, the whole enterprise suffers so that monitoring tools can be justified.

Monitoring compliments system planning because these services help the IT Operations department catch up on system documentation. All too often, services are added to the IT system on an ad-hoc basis to meet a new requirement from one part of the company, creating a network and menu of services that the IT Operations technicians keep track of mentally, deriving a system map over time through the experience of running the system. Creating a system monitoring service solidifies that experience and makes it easier to transfer knowledge to new staff.

LogicMonitor and Datadog are cloud-based system monitoring services that will explore and document your system on startup and then track your IT services’ evolution. Each gives a full account of your IT assets and then brings their performance in line with expectations. While operating from the cloud, each of these systems installs agent services on your site and on the cloud platforms that you use to gather data.

These two services are very similar, and if you are looking for a monitoring package, you will find it difficult to choose between them. So, here is a look at LogicMonitor and Datadog to help you identify which would be more suitable for your organization.

LogicMonitor highlights

Based in Santa Barbara, California, LogicMonitor was founded by Steve Francis in 2008 and has been led by CEO Kevin McGibben since 2011. The business is still a private company and has been owned by Vista Equity Partners since April 2018. Another major investor is Providence Strategic Growth.

Since 2018, the company has accelerated its service expansion through a series of acquisitions and continued its in-house development effort.

The LogicMonitor system was designed from the beginning to support data centers. A vital service for data centers is connectivity, and a typical data center client would be operating several locations – if only for secure backups. So, from the beginning, the client base of LogicMonitor made using a cloud platform for delivering a natural choice. The SaaS deployment model enables LogicMonitor to combine the supervision of multiple sites and the connections between them.

Data centers also need to respond to user requests quickly; they deal with high-throughput data transfers and need to allow remote access, so they have security issues to deal with. LogicMonitor evolved to monitor all of these requirements.

Focusing on data centers gives LogicMonitor a more critical requirement for monitoring servers, platform services, and networks. The monitoring of desktops in an office is not so important to that customer base. However, the fact that data centers are used to host websites and Web services means that LogicMonitor needed to develop capabilities monitoring those areas.

LogicMonitor is designed for service providers. However, all of the functionality developed for the package can also be used for internal IT Operations. This is particularly the case for multi-site businesses with a centralized IT management service.

Datadog highlights

Datadog was started in 2010 by Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc. The founders still run the company with Pomel as CEO and Lê-Quôc as the Chief Technology Officer. The company was listed on NASDAQ in 2019.

The original code for Datadog was acquired from Server Density. This was eventually wholly rewritten in Go and moved to a hosted system as a SaaS package. The core of Datadog monitors networks, servers, and applications. It is also able to apply these practices to cloud resources and watches connections between sites.

Through constant redevelopment and acquisition of companies with capabilities in other system management tasks, Datadog has expanded its platform to include log management and security monitoring.

The Datadog team has been able to keep up with new technology, adding website monitoring and the innovation of distributed tracing for microservices. Identifying all supporting functions in the chain of microservices introduced the need for application dependency mapping. Datadog also applies AI in its monitoring systems, predicting how growth in demand by one service could crowd out resources shared with other systems.

Datadog will monitor on-site resources plus Docker AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

More recently, Datadog has added on Cloud Security Posture Management, which is a vulnerability manager. It also has a new Incident Management module.

LogicMonitor vs Datadog head-to-head

LogicMonitor and Datadog have many functions in common. The big difference between the two systems lies in their pricing. LogicMonitor offers one central package that covers the parts of many different packages offered by Datadog. So, when comparing the two systems, it is necessary to compare LogicMonitor with all of the subscriptions available in Datadog. In addition, LogicMonitor keeps its Synthetic Monitoring service as a separate package.

Standard features of LogicMonitor and Datadog

LogicMonitor has two plan levels with more functions available in its higher plan. Synthetic Monitoring is a different plan. Datadog has 12 other packages, and some of these have subsets of service. However, looking through all of the benefits both companies offer, you will find the following systems available from both providers.

• Site infrastructure monitoring covering networks, servers, and applications
• Monitoring of virtualizations
• Container monitoring
• Network topology monitoring
• Network traffic analysis
• Monitoring for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform
• Database monitoring
• Web application monitoring
• The ability to combine the monitoring of several sites
• AI-processes for resource shortage predictions
• Log management and analysis
• Distributed tracing
• Synthetic monitoring for Web pages
• Integrations that add on functionality to monitor specific products or technologies

Differences between LogicMonitor and Datadog

Datadog has more modules available than those offered by LogicMonitor. However, LogicMonitor does have some functions that Datadog doesn’t provide:

LogicMonitor

• Capacity planning and forecasting
• DevOps management and testing
• Configuration Manager

Datadog

• Application dependency mapping
• Web application vulnerability scanning
• Accurate user monitoring for websites
• A SIEM system for security monitoring
• Bug tracking
• Incident management

Plans

The organization of these two systems into modules makes them similar. However, their packaging is very different.

LogicMonitor

The services of LogicMonitor are divided into two sections:

• Core
• Synthetic Monitoring

The Core system contains just about all of the modules of LogicMonitor; it is available in two editions:

• Pro
• Enterprise

Pro is appropriate for systems that include up to 200 nodes, and Enterprise is for those businesses with more than 200 nodes. The modules contained in each are:

Pro

• Network monitoring
• Server monitoring
• Application monitoring
• Storage monitoring
• Database monitoring
• Cloud monitoring (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Container monitoring (Kubernetes)
• SaaS App monitoring
• Website monitoring
• Network topology mapping
• Netflow analysis
• Data Retention of one year

Enterprise

• Network monitoring
• Server monitoring
• Application monitoring
• Storage monitoring
• Database monitoring
• Cloud monitoring (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Container monitoring (Kubernetes)
• SaaS App monitoring
• Website monitoring
• Network topology mapping
• Netflow analysis
• Data Retention
• NBAR management
• AIOps Early Warning System
• Anomaly detection
• Dynamic Services monitoring
• Child accounts for managed service provider clients
• Sandbox for development teams
• Configuration Management
• LM Logs — log file collection and analysis
• Data Retention of two years

Datadog

Datadog has 12 modules, some of which have sub-modules, which increases the total number of plans available.

• Infrastructure – Monitors network, servers, and services, such as VMs and containers. This module covers cloud platforms as well as on-site resources. Add-ons for this module are the monitoring of AWS Fargate data and IoT device monitoring.
• Application Performance Monitoring – This service includes application dependency mapping and implements AI predictions-based for resource availability monitoring.
• Continuous Profiler – This service is only available in conjunction with the Application Performance Monitoring service, creating a higher plan for the APM. It displays code as it runs and analyzes performance.
• Database Monitoring – Monitors PostgreSQL, MySQL, Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora, and Google Cloud SQL.
• Accurate User Monitoring – Monitors live website performance and include an Error Tracker module.
• Synthetic Monitoring – This monitor is available in two forms: API tests for automated system checks and Browser-based tests to exercise interactive elements in Web pages.
• Serverless Monitoring – This module implements distributed tracing to track the functions of APIs and microservices. The system uses AI methods to predict potential resource shortages.
• Network Performance Monitoring – A traffic analysis service for physical networks.
• Network Device Monitoring – This service gathers network device status reports through SNMP procedures.
• Log Management Ingest – Collects, consolidates files, and gives access to log messages.
• Retain or Rehydrate – A log archive management system.
• Security Monitoring – A SIEM system that detects security breaches by analyzing log files.
• Cloud Security Posture Management – A vulnerability scanner for cloud services that operate continuously.
• Cloud Workload Security – Internet security protection offering real-time protection against hackers and adding file protection monitoring.
• Incident Management – An issue management system that can be a Help Desk platform or a collaboration and task management tool for development teams.

Pros & Cons

LogicMonitor

Datadog

Prices

LogicMonitor doesn’t publish its prices. Instead, you have to contact the Sales Department to request a quote.

The prices for Datadog modules are:

• Infrastructure: Free – $0, Pro – $15, Enterprise – $23 per host per month
• Infrastructure add-ons: AWS Fargate data monitoring – $1 per task, IoT device monitoring – $5 per device
• Application Performance Monitoring: $31 per host per month
• Application Performance Monitoring + Continuous Profiler: $40 per month
• Database Monitoring: $70 per database per month
• Real User Monitoring: $15 per 10,000 sessions per month
• Synthetic Monitoring: API Tests – $5, Browser Tests – $12 for every 1,000 test runs per month
• Serverless Monitoring: $5 per million invocations per month
• Network Performance Monitoring: Network Performance Monitoring $5 per device per month
• Network Device Monitoring: $7 per device per month
• Security Monitoring: $0.20 per GB of throughput per month
• Cloud Security Posture Management: $7.50 per host per month
• Cloud Workload Security: $15 per host per month
• Log Management Ingest: $0.10 per GB of throughput
• Log Management Retain or Rehydrate: $1.70 per million log events per month
• Incident Management: $20 per user per month

Free trial

LogicMonitor offers a 14-day free trial of its Core editions. Datadog provides a 14-day free trial on all of its modules.

The verdict

For general system monitoring, there is little to choose between LogicMonitor and Datadog. However, if you run all of the types of systems that these monitoring platforms offer, you would find it easier to take out an account with LogicMonitor because they provide one bundle, whereas, for the same services with Datadog, you would have to run through the menu and take out subscriptions for each module.

Both of the systems can be expanded by integrations that add on specific features for monitoring third-party tools. In addition, both systems cover multiple sites and can integrate the monitoring of on-site and cloud-based resources.

One notable difference is that the LogicMonitor offers a multi-tenanted configuration for managed service providers, which enables MSPs to keep the data for each client separately and even allows client technicians access to their area LogicMonitor account. However, the tailoring of the system for MSP usage is an area that Datadog needs to work on.

Datadog offers security monitoring, which LogicMonitor doesn’t have. New modules, such as the Incident Management service, show that Datadog is expanding rapidly. However, those who need system management tools for a straightforward network will get configuration management from LogicMonitor, which Datadog doesn’t have.