Datadog Alternatives

Dotcom-Monitor: The performance monitoring platform for all your web pages, web applications, APIs, web services, and infrastructure.

Ensure uptime, performance, and availability on a global scale with the solutions from Dotcom-Monitor.

Monitor your most complex websites, web applications, APIs, and web services.

Comprehensive reports and metrics allow you to quickly identify the root cause of downtime or performance issues.

Features	Datadog	Other Providers	Dotcom-Monitor
Easy to use dashboard
Powerful, point and click scripting tool
Real browser-based monitoring
24/7 support standard for all solutions
Popular third-party integrations
Straightforward plans and pricing

During the last decade, the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) industry has become highly competitive in terms of strategy and technology. A multitude of vendors came out offering their solutions and viewpoints regarding APM. Since then, the term APM has come to mean many things, spanning across many digital platforms, rather than just a single market.

However, there are still some companies that are providing services keeping in mind the original fundamentals of APM. We’ll compare one such APM provider, Dotcom-Monitor with a relatively new player, Datadog, and see what they have to offer for increasing the performance of your online web properties. We’ll also try to decipher which one of these two APM solutions could better suit your applications and environments.

Dotcom-Monitor is a long-standing player in the APM domain. Ever since its inception in 1998, the company has steadily gained in popularity and user base. Dotcom-Monitor has mainly built its APM solution around monitoring web-based products and applications. Dotcom-Monitor provides an all-in-one suite of monitoring and performance testing tools for websites, web applications, web services, API’s, and critical infrastructure. With a global network of monitoring locations, users can optimize performance an ensure a consistent end-user experience from nearly every region of the world.

Datadog was founded in 2010, and they initially only provided monitoring for cloud infrastructure. Datadog provides a monitoring and analytics platform for cloud applications. They bring together data from servers, containers, databases, and third-party services to see inside the full stack. This visibility allows DevOps teams avoid downtime, resolve performance issues, and ensure customers are getting a consistent user experience. And it wasn’t until 2016 that they announced a beta-release of their application performance monitoring solution, entering the market as a full-stack monitoring solutions provider.

Datadog vs. Dotcom-Monitor

Monitoring Web Services

Web services include, but are not limited to, REST APIs, SOAP Services, SMTP, TCP, ICMP, XML, and JSON. These services are the backbone of any application that is dependent on it. Hence, it is essential to make sure that your web services are working up to their potential.

Dotcom-Monitor offers a web services monitoring solution for SOAP, REST, JSON, XML, and OAuth 2.0 web services by validating their response content, performance, and uptime. The performance of a service is measured by setting alert thresholds for both minimum and maximum response times. And the validation of the response is carried out by verifying that the API calls return proper text, JSON, or XML. You can access all the monitoring results on their dashboard, which is laid out in a straightforward and clear manner.

Datadog also offers monitoring for REST APIs and SOAP services under two different products called Synthetic Monitoring and an integration called HTTP Check. Both solutions present an intuitive and easy to use interface for setting-up REST and SOAP API monitoring. However, Datadog does not have any dedicated solution for monitoring OAuth 2.0 flow. So, if your application uses OAuth services like Facebook or Google for the login process, then Dotcom-monitor is your only option.

Monitoring Web Pages

If your business depends on your website to be up and available, then you should look for Dotcom-Monitor’s Web Page Monitoring solution. The solution can test and measure the various aspects of a web page and provides a detailed breakdown of performance. The monitoring happens on real browsers located across the world, and you can also simulate your website’s behavior with 2G, 3G, or 4G connections during monitoring.On their dashboard, you can easily

determine which parts of your website load quickly and which elements load with a delay. Any errors, along with other metrics, are also available. Dotcom-Monitor offers much more detailed analytics for website monitoring.

Datadog offers website uptime monitoring with SLO (Service Level Objectives). Like Dotcom-Monitor, you can monitor a specific URL. However, the level of monitoring leaves much to be desired here, as you only get information about uptime and any network-level errors, and you don’t get a detailed element-by-element breakdown as you do with Dotcom-Monitor.

Web Application Monitoring

The EveryStep Web Recorder will show you how to create basic monitoring scripts for web applications, server uptime tasks, and load testing.

For web applications that deal with complex user data and transaction steps, monitoring can become quite the challenging task. However, Dotcom-Monitor has an intuitive solution for monitoring complex and dynamic web applications. The EveryStep Web Recorder can record common UI paths for specific actions and run them on real browsers and devices located across the world. You can also validate the content being loaded by placing multiple keyword or image-based checks. The recorder supports over 40 desktop/mobile devices and browsers. Due to its simple, yet effective approach, the EveryStep Web Recorder allows you to interact with a variety of dynamic web application technologies, such as Angular, Vue, React, Flash, AJAX, HTML5, and more. The EveryStep Web Recorder can handle almost anything you throw at it.

Datadog offers a similar script recorder to Dotcom Monitor’s EveryStep Web Recorder, wherein you can use their web-based tool to record steps related to a transaction and run these tests on data centers located around the world. However, Datadog does not support monitoring dynamic web applications such as Vue, Angular, or React. They do offer integration with platforms that can handle dynamic web application monitoring—for example, Sentry. This integration does require you to pay for multiple services, so if your software stack includes JavaScript frameworks, then Dotcom-Monitor is an ideal solution.

Additionally, as of early 2019, Datadog launched their RUM (Real User Monitoring) solution for customers wanting to see the full end user experience by measuring the performance of real users.

Infrastructure Monitoring

Dotcom-Monitor offers dedicated monitoring solutions for most of your infrastructural needs. They have monitoring solutions available for different parts of your infrastructure, such as network, FTP servers, DNS performance, SMTP/IMAP email servers, and even VOIP services.

Datadog also offers server monitoring and network monitoring. They can monitor Linux servers and containers along with the performance of the network communications between multiple hosts. As for what you should choose depends entirely on your infrastructure. If you don’t use Docker or other similar containers, then Dotcom-Monitor can be a simple yet powerful solution.

Load Testing

Load testing involves putting your application through heavy traffic to determine any performance issues related to scaling, concurrency, and responsiveness. Dotcom-Monitor offers a cloud-based solution called LoadView that can perform real browser-based stress-testing across a global, distributed network of devices. The LoadView solution is separate from their monitoring solutions, but users can access it through the same dashboard as all their monitoring solutions, making it an ideal one-stop shop for your performance testing needs.

Unfortunately, Datadog does not offer any tool or solution dedicated for load/stress testing. Your only option is to go with the LoadView platform.

Dotcom-Monitor Plans and Pricing

1-5 minute check frequency
HTTP/S
Web Server
Web API – SOAP/REST
ICMP/Ping
SSL certification checks

1-180 minute check frequency
Real browsers (Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox)
Desktop/mobile/tablets
Detailed waterfalls
Video capture
DOM element timings
Element trend reporting
Content validation
DNS/SSL/Connect breakdown

1-180 minute check frequency
EveryStep Web Recorder (web-based scripting tool)
Chrome/Internet Explorer playback
Desktop/mobile/tablets
Playback video capture
Detailed waterfall charts
Image/content validation
Support for dynamic web applications, such as Flash, Silverlight, AJAX, and more

1-180min check frequency
Streaming media servers
Email servers
DNS
Traceroute
FTP
VoIP/SIP
DNS Blacklist
Telnet/Port check

Datadog Plans and Pricing

400+ integrations
Dashboards
Machine-learning-based alerts
Live processes (Enterprise only)
Single sign-on (Pro and Enterprise only)

Find bottlenecks
Distributed tracing across microservices, containers, etc.
Supports Java, Ruby, Python, .NET, and more.
Dashboards

Detect threats across all ingested data
Set up custom detection rules
15-month retention of security logs

Network traffic mapping
Hybrid and cloud supported
User-defined tagging
Deploys in minutes

Monitor site availability and uptime
Record tests without coding
Global test locations
Alerting capabilities

Troubleshoot performance issues
Drill-down at the page level
See issues by location

Datadog vs. Dotcom-Monitor

We learned what Dotcom-Monitor and Datadog have to offer in terms of APM. In most all of the cases, Dotcom-Monitor seems to be a solid choice. Dotcom-Monitor offers clear plans and pricing that make sure that you won’t be breaking the bank in the process. Datadog offers many plans with multiple tiers, which can lead to confusion and unexpected price increases. Some Datadog users have expressed frustration with their dashboards and there can be a steep learning curve in finding where your information lives. With Dotcom-Monitor, you pay for only the monitoring you need and every plan comes standard with great features like 24/7 support, unlimited public dashboards, multi-user support, third-party integrations, and much more.