The complication of infrastructure is increasing daily as a result of numerous causes like developments in technology, a shifting work culture, increased availability of high-speed internet, and many more.
These shifts have, without a shadow of a doubt, been positive omens for both companies and their personnel, but at the same time, they have made monitoring incomparably more difficult. Imagine the amount of time and effort that would be required to monitor every single piece of hardware and software that is connected to your network.
The monitoring platforms can be of use here. These platforms can monitor a wide variety of devices, including port utilization, network traffic, endpoints, and more. They monitor the state of health and performance of your networks and bring to your attention any current or potential vulnerabilities, allowing you to make the necessary repairs as soon as they are discovered.
These monitoring platforms perform a constant scan of your network and all of its devices to look for any changes. If they find any, they notify the relevant devices, along with their contextual information, which enables you to take immediate action.
Despite this, there are numerous monitoring platforms accessible nowadays, making it a challenging task to select the most appropriate one. In this article, we will examine the similarities and differences between two widely used platforms: ManageEngine’s Applications Manager and Datadog.
What is ManageEngine Applications Manager?
The Apps Manager from ManageEngine is an all-encompassing monitoring platform that offers visibility into the various components and applications that make up your network. It comes equipped with a plethora of capabilities that continuously monitor all parts of your network and trigger warnings when one or more components are performing above or below the threshold values that have been defined.
This is an intelligent platform that will not only alert you but will also supply the surrounding contextual information to assist you in better comprehending the issue or the circumstance. All of this is delivered to you in a timely and smooth manner, with minimal to no additional costs incurred on your end.
ManageEngine APM is a solution loaded with features and can cater to the requirements of every company, ranging from small and medium-sized businesses to huge corporations. The most valuable aspects of it are its cost and the flexibility with which it may be deployed. It is a powerful characteristic that the program can be combined with a wide variety of different tools, and it can scale from the most basic to the most sophisticated of configurations.
Despite this, some customers have voiced their dissatisfaction with the product upgrading procedure, citing instances in which it was difficult to complete or led to complications that rendered the system inoperable.
However, the rapid response from the product support team is typically successful in fixing the issues. Aside from that one issue, it’s not easy to find problems with this whole bundle. In general, the ManageEngine Application Performance Manager is a wonderful solution that may assist any company in better managing its applications and business services.
The functionalities of the Application Manager are broken down in further detail below.
Key Features
The following are some of the benefits that the ManageEngine Applications Manager can bring to your company.
- Ensure that your private, public, and hybrid cloud environments are visible to you.
- Keeping an eye on the servers will help you avoid unexpected outages.
- Identify and resolve any database issues that are affecting the performance of your network.
- Keep an eye on the performance of the application, and investigate any problems that arise.
- Manage the monitoring of synthetically generated transactions.
- Ensure that real-time monitoring of the user experience is performed.
- Enable automatic discovery of services and apps.
Moving on, let’s get a better understanding of what Datadog is and the skills it possesses.
What is Datadog?
Datadog is a monitoring service that is delivered as software as a service (SaaS), and it continuously assesses the performance of your servers, applications, databases, tools, and other components. This analytics platform offers comprehensive access to virtually any stack or application, and it can do it in any location.
In its most basic form, it consolidates data about many aspects of your network into a single console, providing you with a holistic perspective on how well your network is operating overall. In the same vein, this assists in getting a clearer context of the issues and enables you to give a repair promptly.
The software as a service (SaaS) approach utilized by Datadog makes it an excellent choice for businesses who do not wish to burden themselves with the implementation of any resource-intensive on-premise monitoring solution.
This tool’s extensive list of features makes it an ideal choice for service-oriented businesses, small and medium-sized businesses, and smaller networks that do not have specialized IT staff that can monitor the infrastructure at a granular level. It’s possible that more extensive networks with various remote locations will find Datadog’s agent-based strategy to be inconvenient because each agent will have to be installed manually.
However, Datadog is an effective network monitoring and infrastructure management tool once the agent installation and configuration process has been completed.
Key Features
The following is an overview of the features that Datadog can provide for your company.
- Offers an unrestricted view into the apps.
- Includes cutting-edge tools for automation, monitoring, and instrumentation in the package.
- Integrations with any popular platforms and apps are supported.
- Log data are analyzed, and the context of any problems that occur is provided.
- Keeps an eye on the user experience.
- The ability to provide reports that correlate performance with the total impact on the business.
- Included in the package are interactive dashboards.
Let’s undertake a head-to-head comparison across several characteristics to determine which of the two platforms is superior to the other in meeting your requirements, now that you have a general understanding of both options.
Detail Comparison between ManageEngine Application & Datadog
Dashboards and Visualizations of ManageEngine
The ManageEngine APM platform enables you to visualize your complete IT infrastructure in a single, fully customizable dashboard that is packed with an abundance of features and graphical data visualizations. It includes the Default Dashboard, Business View, Availability, and QoS Worldwide Dashboards in its standard configuration.
It utilizes a browser-based interface that is contemporary, albeit appearing fairly cluttered at times. Consequently, navigating the site may first provide some challenges due to the large number of choices that must be taken into consideration. Despite this, ManageEngine APM is still deemed visually appealing from an aesthetic point of view. It is also quite simple to use the drag-and-drop tools that are provided to construct your own bespoke maps.
Dashboard and Visualizations of Datadog
These are both aesthetically acceptable from a visual perspective. The dashboard design of Datadog is both clean and modern, making it aesthetically pleasing. In addition, Datadog allows you to personalize your dashboards by providing a huge library of visualization tools and widgets that can be dragged and dropped into place. However, to get everything functioning properly, a significant amount of preparatory work is required.
Reporting and APIs of ManageEngine
The ManageEngine APM reporting module enables you to generate and export standard reports directly from the application. The reports that are generated provide an overview of the availability, health, reaction time, and application alerts that occurred over a given period. Because the reports are generated dynamically, you will only be able to view reports for those monitors that you have personally created in the APM.
You can either pre-schedule the running of reports at certain times or run them ad hoc using the date and time constraints that are relevant to your needs. ManageEngine APM offers REST APIs, which make it easier to integrate the product with a variety of internal portals and other monitoring solutions. The reporting feature of ManageEngine APM will be empowering for those in charge of managing a network.
APIs and Reports of Datadog
Instead of providing the typical out-of-the-box reports that the vast majority of network administrators anticipate, the Datadog approach to reporting strives to make metrics easily accessible, and it performs a good job of achieving this goal.
Even though some network administrators favor the wonderful old well-prepared fixed PDF report, others do not need it at all. As a result, Datadog also comes pre-packaged with an easy-to-use API that has the potential to considerably broaden the scope of the metrics that Datadog can measure.
The Datadog Application Programming Interface (API) is an HTTP REST API that allows programmatic access to the Datadog platform and responds to all queries with JSON data.
Alerts and Notifications of ManageEngine
In ManageEngine APM, there are several sorts of alerts, which are often referred to as alarms. Each alarm has a different purpose.
The monitor’s availability, health, area, or other characteristics determines whether an alarm is generated. Alarms notify network admins about defects in the application and trigger actions such as email notification, SMS notification, or the execution of custom scripts based on your settings.
Alarms can also provide additional information. ManageEngine APM makes use of AIOps technology, which combines machine learning and big data, to produce intelligent alarms. As a result, you will be able to prevent alert storms and get to the bottom of problems more quickly.
Alarms and Notifications of Datadog
Datadog uses a method that it calls Watchdog, which is based on machine learning (ML). This method is used for alerts and notifications. Watchdog can find faults in your infrastructure, apps, and services by making use of machine learning techniques, and it can also report anomalies. In Datadog, these notifications are referred to as Monitors. PagerDuty, Slack, and email are all methods that users can use to receive alerts.
These can be determined by almost any metric that Datadog can capture. As a consequence of this, every warning is granular, actionable, and relevant, even in contexts that are expansive and transient. Datadog stands out from the competition thanks to its innovative approach to alerts and notifications, which also helps to reduce downtime and minimizes alert fatigue.
Pricing of ManageEngine
The price of Applications Manager is determined by two factors: the number of users who will be accessing the dashboards and the number of aspects (memory, CPU usage, bandwidth, speed, etc.) that you want to monitor in a device. The number of users who will be accessing the dashboards determines how many users will be accessing the dashboards. Users have a lot of leeway in terms of customization with this pricing plan. In addition, you can choose between purchasing a license that is valid for an unlimited amount of time or one that is valid for one year and includes support expenses.
Pricing of Datadog
Within Datadog, you may decide from several pricing choices, giving you granular control over how much you pay. According to your requirements, you have access to more than 15 distinct pricing categories from which to pick. The rates are all billed on an annual basis.
Final thoughts
In conclusion, Datadog is the best option for your company if a significant portion of your operations is performed in the cloud. In a similar vein, Datadog is the best option for you if you utilize an operating system that is neither Windows nor Linux or if you are an individual who is looking to add some monitoring features to their existing infrastructure.
This cloud-based platform assures that you do not need to allocate resources for setup and monitoring, making it perfect for startups and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that are working with a limited budget. Large corporations who are contemplating moving their monitoring operations to the cloud may also find success with this solution.
On the other hand, go with Applications Manager if you are looking for a monitoring solution that covers a wide range of aspects for your environment that is hosted on-premises, and you have the resources necessary to manage them. A significant selling point is the company’s adaptable pricing plan, in particular, the choice to get a license that is valid indefinitely.
Both ManageEngine Applications Manager and Datadog are, in their own unique ways, complete monitoring systems for your infrastructure. However, their capabilities and deployment are slightly different from one another, so you will want to select the one that is most suited to meeting your requirements.
