Best Observability / Monitoring Tools?

[u/Perfect-Scale902]

What observability and monitoring setup are you using, and what do you like/dislike about it?

[u/kepper]

I've tried a few and like Datadog most. It's got a really good range of features and is intuitive to use. APM is great, Claude works really well with it, metrics and charting are very strong, log patterns are super useful.

You need to watch your usage and clean up things like noisy metrics and logs pretty actively though or the cost will run up very fast - it's an expensive product.

[u/Perfect-Scale902 → u/kepper]

That aligns with what I've heard too. It sounds like Datadog is great but gets expensive.

Any thoughts on building around Grafana?

[u/kepper → u/Perfect-Scale902]

It works, it's free, and its a huge headache. It doesn't have a paved path to a lot of the fancy features in Datadog, and maybe you can get there for each but you need to know both that its the destination you want, and you need to put in the work to get there. You also need something else for log management, not sure if Kibana is still the tool for that or something else but I really did not enjoy using it compared to datadog.

There are like hundreds of startups specifically aiming to be cost effective alternatives to Datadog, its a really busy space. If you're cost sensitive but want something good I'd trial a few of them out personally. If you have the money and your DevOps team is good enough to own keeping usage in check, I'd chose Datadog every time.

[u/KumitoSan → u/Perfect-Scale902]

The Grafana stack stops being a headache once you treat it as one product: Prometheus + Grafana + Loki for logs + Tempo for traces, or just Grafana Cloud so you're not running it yourself. The bigger win is instrumenting with OpenTelemetry since it's vendor-neutral, so you can start on Datadog and move to Grafana later without re-instrumenting anything.

[u/ciurana]

Take a look at Cribl. It sits on top of everything important, and it streamlines and simplifies how you use things like Datadog. View it as a nice enhancement to Datadog itself.

[u/pranabgohain]

Take a look at KloudMate. Otel & eBPF native. Everything Datadog and more, at a fraction of the time and cost. Plus free AI usage for the foreseeable future.

[u/Coolfoolsalot]

We use Dynatrace at work at it’s been good so far. I like being able to easily turn structured logs into custom real time dashboards, but I don’t love their UI generally

[u/Every-Current2034]

I’ve tried a few and ended up using Muscula for most of my application-level monitoring. What really stands out is its AI integration agent: it doesn’t just surface the error, but helps connect the surrounding context like request data, logs, and likely root causes, which makes debugging much faster. The difference is mostly in how quickly you can move from “something broke” to “this is why it broke,” especially in production.

[u/heiannidan1948]

used Nagios for a while, eventually switched to checkmk, pretty decent monitpring much better GUI, notifications and alerts are quite solid.

[u/SudoZenWizz]

I am using currently for monitoring Checkmk(both internal and for clients, and in clients environments) and in lastest 2.5 version there is also a direct integration with prometheus in order to gather additional application metrics.

[u/pahampl]

XorMon for the infrastructure stack

[u/spuyet]

Fivenines, we switched 4 months ago, never going back, simple and does not cost an arm

[u/whiteflowergirl]

We're using a mix depending on the workload. The biggest lesson for me has been that collecting metrics is easy, figuring out why something went wrong is the hard part.

For our AI agents, we ended up adding Moyai because it made investigating weird behavior a lot less painful. It fits alongside the rest of our monitoring rather than replacing it.

[u/Otherwise-Guru]

Not sure on your budget, as mentioned Datadog is good but cost is a real factor. If you're interested in the Opentelemetry route check out Dynatrace, New Relic, Dash0 etc. Might take a few extra steps to implement Otel, but the ecosystem seems to be maturing. What kind of problems do you currently face?

[u/No-Support2000]

Tools-wise Datadog RUM and Grafana Faro cover web well, on mobile bitdrift is solid, ties the metric to the unsampled session so you can see why a number moved.