Datadog Network Performance Monitoring

Datadog network performance monitoring helps you visualize the flow of traffic within your cloud-native environments. It uses meaningful human-readable tags to help you find and resolve problems before they impact your end users.

Datadog is a multi-faceted infrastructure management and application monitoring solution served as software as a service (SaaS). It features a serverless tier, log management and security and real user monitoring.

Multi-Cloud Visibility

Datadog is a network monitoring tool that combines cloud infrastructure and on-prem applications, tools and servers into a single dashboard. It automatically identifies and catalogs devices and links to generate a network inventory and topology map. Its unified view of cloud environments enables IT and development teams to quickly identify issues like latency, performance degradation and security threats.

Multi-cloud visibility is crucial to successful operations, particularly in distributed, application-centric architectures. Unlike conventional networks, the structure of these environments is fluid, with components that may be deployed across multiple services and providers. As a result, they can be difficult to monitor and track from a single dashboard.

With Datadog, IT and development teams can visualize the architecture of these environments in granular detail. With out-of-the-box tags, they can analyze traffic based on meaningful entities, such as services, availability zones, Kubernetes pods and security groups. They can also examine request and service traces to understand how those elements interact.

To address these challenges, it’s essential to have the ability to see cross-availability zone traffic—which can drive costs and increase network latency if it happens often. Datadog’s built-in Saved View aggregating data by the availability zone tag makes it easy to find this information. It is also possible to set up alerts based on this data, so that a team is notified if the performance of an application or service degrades significantly across availability zones.

Correlation

Datadog allows you to correlate network metrics from different layers of your application stack. For example, if you notice an unexpected spike in TCP retransmits in the Network view, you can easily open a side panel to explore correlated logs, request traces, and processes for further context. This enables you to identify and resolve issues faster.

Metric correlation is easy to use from any Datadog view or integration, including dashboards, notebooks, APM, and alerts. Just left click on any graph to find potential root causes for an issue. You can even search for correlated metrics by name or label from the full-screen view.

Traditional real user monitoring (RUM) and application performance management (APM) solutions are siloed, requiring manual correlation efforts between frontend and backend traces. This can slow down on-call engineering teams when trying to troubleshoot revenue-impacting issues. Datadog’s automatic two-way correlation between frontend RUM session data and backend traces eliminates these blind spots, helping you quickly identify the source of customer experience issues.

Datadog’s multi-cloud visibility enables you to track network traffic in granular detail, while also aggregating it by meaningful entities, from services and availability zones to Kubernetes pods and security groups. This helps you quickly pinpoint where your bandwidth is being used, whether it’s a saturated switch port or a dropped connection through a firewall. The service also monitors the status of network devices, such as switches, routers, and load balancers, which can help you detect outages or WAN congestion.

Saved Views

Datadog is a cloud-based tool built to automatically discover network devices and their connections, then plot them on a topology map. With Datadog, IT teams can spot inconsistencies, bottlenecks and other issues more quickly, while also optimizing their technology stack and reducing costs.

Visibility into communication between applications and services is essential to monitoring DevOps performance. Traditional NPM tools fit the bill for VMs, but they don’t provide visibility into network traffic between more ephemeral compute units like containers. Datadog’s network performance monitoring feature is designed to help IT teams identify and resolve issues in complex, distributed architectures.

Network performance monitoring analyzes network traffic at the transport layer, including TCP and DNS, to uncover application interdependencies and visualize network topology. Datadog’s network performance monitoring uses a technology called flow analytics, which aggregates and displays traffic across all layers of the network and can be filtered by tags such as service, Kubernetes deployment, Docker image, Chef role, AWS security group and more.

Datadog’s network performance monitoring also uses a technology called eBPF, which provides unprecedented visibility into network communications by measuring and recording each packet that traverses the network. This enables Datadog to capture and display the full context of network flows, including correlated metrics and request traces, without the typical performance trade-offs that come with other solutions.

Alerts

Depending on the types of data you choose to monitor, Datadog alerts you when there is an abnormal change in that data. It also supports aggregating data across custom tags, making it easy to see performance metrics based on your own criteria.

The Datadog agent automatically starts collecting metrics once you install it on a server or device. Within minutes, you can start seeing host-level data like CPU, memory, and disk utilization populating a dashboard. Once you create integrations for the different technologies in your stack, you’ll be able to see their key metrics on a dedicated dashboard as well.

With the help of Datadog’s 200+ integrations, you can get visibility for all the tools in your tech stack and quickly detect issues from the network layer down to containers and cloud infrastructure. The platform offers several machine learning algorithms, including anomaly detection and outlier detection. It can also detect the root cause of problems by correlating metrics, traces, and logs.

LogicMonitor is an alternative to Datadog that offers an all-in-one solution for monitoring your infrastructure and applications. This Datadog competitor has robust monitoring capabilities for both on-premise and cloud environments and enables you to correlate data with logs and synthetic monitoring. Besides, LogicMonitor provides a number of customizable out-of-the-box dashboards and a powerful alerting system that includes AIOps logic for root cause analysis and forecasting.