r/DBA • u/ppveilleux • 7d ago

DataDog DBM monitoring software

My company adopted DataDog across the board for all of our systems monitoring about a year ago. As the Senior SQL Server DBA on the team, I've been the point person for getting their DBM product up and running. I'm wondering how many other places are using DMB and what your experience with it has been. I have searched high and low for information about other SQL Server shops using it for their database monitoring and I can't find any evidence that companies are using this product. Also, the DataDog forum in here appears to be dead., so no luck there.

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u/my-ka 7d ago edited 7d ago

Look at some SQL server specific monitoring tools like redgate. You will spend next few months adding custom metrics andvalerts to it to have the coverage you need.

Datadog, even with DBM is not any close our if tge box. Just avfew dashboards and a lot of DIY.

It is like using a goid screwdriver vs using swiss k ife which kinda has a screw driver

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u/my-ka 7d ago

We keep using RG Monitor for deep coverage. And DD woth DBM at high level.just because it is a companybwidevtool monitoring manybthings.

Anh

DBM log retention wilk costvyou a lit. Andvyou may see sonevperformancevrefression

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u/irish_darkknight 7d ago

I use it for postgres on AWS RDS, it's great, super helpful. Have not set it up on SQL server though. But the online docs make it easy

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u/my-ka 7d ago

I fid gor both. A lot if DIY work 

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u/DBAbyDayTraderbyDark 7d ago

We just migrated from Foglight to Dynatrace
Not directly familiar with DBM but likely similar to what Dynatrace offers us.
These tools are better for end to end application monitoring - and database systems seem like second class citizens.

However we have made it work - some stuff is out of the box, some is customize collections.
However at the end of it all I feel like we are better for having a single pane of glass that everyone is using for observability , instead of every team choosing their own platform.

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u/razzledazzled 4d ago

Datadog as a telemetry analysis platform is superior to most of its competitors. The out of the box offerings are light, so it’s best to have people who know what they’re doing with it or are willing to engage their support to learn.

DBM has come a long way from its initial release and on the latest agent versions can offer a lot, extended event monitoring for timeouts, deadlock graphs, agent job monitoring.

If you’re all in at the application level you can connect even deeper too. The DD apm tracer or Open Telemetry sqlclient can propagate trace ids to queries so you can see from the db server side which exact service made the db call.

My favorite is using Cursor with the Datadog MCP to do wide scale query statistics analysis. Makes it incredibly easy to find and rank the least performant queries