DataDog vs Paessler PRTG Hosted Monitor

One of the market trends today in the monitoring domain is providing a hosted service. Monitoring solution companies develop unique products that differ from their competitors. On top of that, they offer cloud-based hosted services so that their clients don’t have to set up everything on their own. If you have experience in using open-source software, you will know it is not an easy task to launch and maintain it. It costs the budget and time of teams. There are many hosted monitoring solutions on the market to assist companies in efficiently monitoring their digital assets.

Among many, this article will talk about two main monitoring solutions – DataDog and Paessler PRTG and compare them to help you make an informed decision.

We took a deep dive and assess both solutions in terms of features, pricing and user interfaces.

What is DataDog?

DataDog was founded in 2010 to provide an observability service for cloud-scale applications, servers, databases, tools, and services. Their SaaS-based data analytics platform helps customers quickly grasp the status of their infrastructure and take effective actions. DataDog was built upon Go – a programming language and other backend and frontend languages such as D3, Apache Cassandra, Kafka, PostgreSQL, and more. Their solution supports major cloud services including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

What is Paessler PRTG?

Before jumping into an in-depth comparison, let’s find out what Paessler PRTG is. Paessler was established in Germany in 1997. Since then, they have offered to monitor solutions for businesses in different industries and all sizes. Now, they have more than 500,000 users worldwide that rely on PRTG and other Paessler products to monitor all types of digital assets such as IT infrastructures, OT, and IoT devices. Their motivation behind those products is to minimize human efforts for monitoring and put efficiency in place for system operation.

DataDog vs Paessler PRTG

In this section, we will compare two monitoring platforms from three different perspectives. We will discuss their major features, cost structures, and user interface.

Major features

DataDog and Paessler PRTG both have a wide range of features, so it is important to understand their major functionalities that can fit your monitoring goals.

DataDog

DataDog has multiple monitoring products. Among them, let’s look at the monitoring services that target infrastructure and networks.

Infrastructure monitoring

DataDog provides SaaS-based infrastructure monitoring services that include metrics, visualizations, and notifications to make sure your teams can operate and optimize your cloud and hybrid infrastructure environments. Its infrastructure monitoring platform has a simple deployment process that you can deploy your monitoring development work anywhere including on-premise, hybrid, IoT, and multi-cloud. You can integrate DataDog’s monitoring stack with other popular technologies such as Kubernetes, serverless platforms, and other 500+ popular technologies. Its alert system is backed by machine learning, which automatically reduces noise and delivers what matters the most.

Network performance monitoring

DataDog’s network performance monitoring solution visualizes network traffic across applications, containers, availability zones, and data centers. Amid this wide web of network traffic, you can track key metrics such as TCP retransmits, latency, and connection churn.  You can monitor the traffic health between endpoints, IP address, port, or PID layers. In addition, you can monitor communication between services, pods, cloud regions, and cloud resources. By tracking large traffic spikes and their cause, you can optimize network costs. The performance monitoring supports observation and analysis of traffic to cloud services including Amazon S3, Amazon ELB, GCP BigQuery, and others.

Network device monitoring

The network device monitoring gives users end-to-end coverage that encompasses network devices on premise and in the cloud. With the device monitoring solution, you can see the status of your devices in any interface, on any device, or on any network. The solution can automatically detect and collect metrics in your network from various devices including those from Cisco, Palo Alto, Dell, F5, Juniper, and others. You can search your devices and drill down to the performance.

Paessler PRTG

Now let’s discover the major features of Paessler PRTG. PRTG has three main categories when it comes to main monitoring products: PRTG Network Monitor, PRTG Enterprise Monitor, and PRTG Hosted Monitor.

PRTG Hosted Monitor

PRTG Hosted Monitor (SaaS) eases the pain of setting up monitoring environments on-premise by a company itself. With the out-of-the-box solution, you can easily launch monitoring clusters to start tracking your systems and forget about maintaining the monitoring infrastructure. Although it is managed by PRTG, the solution provides flexibility to users and customizes HTML pages to suit your needs.

PRTG Network Monitor

PRTG Network Monitor aims at providing enhanced monitoring capacities to closely track network infrastructures. The network monitoring component of PRTG Network Monitor allows users to access more than 10 built-in technologies including email, push, play alarm audio files, or triggering HTTP requests that can trigger events and interact with other applications. PRTG also has on-premise support that can send SMS text messages and run EXE files. PRTG Network Monitor can interact through the powerful web interface that was built by Single Page Application technology. For an additional layer of safety, PRTG Network Monitor comes with a failover cluster solution that automatically performs the transition to a backup cluster.

PRTG Enterprise Monitor

Companies need to choose different monitoring tactics considering the size of their infrastructures to monitor. When there are hundreds or even thousands of monitoring points, building and managing monitoring platforms become a daunting task. PRTG Enterprise Monitor was designed to provide a single-point monitoring solution for large-scale digital assets. The coverage of the enterprise monitor feature is extensive covering devices, applications, networks, services, and more. Also, it provides industry-specific protocols to monitor medical devices, IoT traffic, shop floors, and more. Like DataDog, PRTG Enterprise Monitor offers SLA and service monitoring.

Pricing structures

Next, let’s compare their pricing structures.

DataDog

DataDog’s infrastructure and network monitoring solutions have disparate pricing plans.

• Infrastructure monitoring
  • Free: $0, you can use the free plan to access the core collection and visualization features. You can have up to five hosts.
  • Pro: $15 per month, you can have a centralized monitoring structure that covers systems, services, and serverless functions.
  • Enterprise: $23 per month, you can use advanced features and have administrative controls.
• Network monitoring
  • Network performance monitoring: the price starts at $5 per host and month. The price is based on a yearly bill. For on-demand, it is $7.20.
  • Network device monitoring: the price starts at $7 per host and month. The price is based on a yearly bill. For on-demand, it is $10.20.

Paessler PRTG

Paessler has five pricing plans.

• Free – with Paessler PRTG Network Monitor’s free version, you can track up to 100 services in your network, which should suffice for up to 10 terminals running up to 10 services each for an unlimited time.
• Hosted 500: $149 per month that covers 500 aspects of your devices in your network, which is equivalent to about 50 devices.
• Hosted 1000: $279 per month that covers 1,000 aspects of your devices in your network, which is equivalent to about 100 devices.
• Hosted 2500: $599 per month that covers 2,500 aspects of your devices in your network, which is equivalent to about 250 devices.
• Hosted 5000: $999 per month that covers 5,000 aspects of your devices in your network, which is equivalent to about 500 devices.
• Hosted 10000: $1,499 per month that covers 10,000 aspects of your devices in your network, which is equivalent to about 1,000 devices.

Although the basic billing cycle is monthly, you can select a yearly subscription. You can try a monthly plan and switch to a yearly plan later.

User interface designs

In monitoring, being able to access an intuitive user interface is important to effectively perform monitoring tasks.

DataDog

DataDog provides out-of-the-box dashboards for features and integrations. With the prebuilt templates, you can quickly launch your first dashboard. DataDog allows you to clone the interface of dashboards so that you can minimize the efforts of building similar dashboards. DataDog supports various widget types including charts, maps, timelines, tables, statuses, free text, groups, images, and many more. You can also share your dashboard outside of the DataDog site by generating a unique public URL.

Paessler PRTG

In Paessler PRTG, you can build intuitive and interactive dashboards or maps in Passler’s terms. You can access more than 300 different widgets and can simply drag and drop them to quickly build your first map. It has a built-in map editor to enable customized visualizations. Using HTML syntax, you can deeply customize your maps as you want with various visual elements including icons, data tables, graphs, geographical maps, sunbursts, custom images, and more.

Conclusion

Paessler PRTG and DataDog have different characteristics. However, they both offer extensive monitoring capabilities with diverse features and user-friendly interfaces with flexible pricing models. You can check their websites to learn further about use cases and study which one fits your needs. Since they both offer a free trial, it can be a good idea to experience their products first.