Datadog

Overview

A monitoring service that collects data from a company's software and servers and shows it on dashboards, with alerts when something breaks.

General use

Engineering and operations teams use it to watch system health, find the cause of slowdowns and outages, and get paged when a problem starts.

Insight

Strong at pulling everything about your systems into one view once it is set up. The bill is the main complaint: costs can balloon as you add hosts, logs, and features, and the pricing has many separate line items. Turning everything on without watching usage leads to nasty surprises. Best when you have the scale to justify it and someone minding the spend.