Creating the Ultimate Analytics Stack with Moesif and Datadog
When looking at API analytics and monitoring platforms, many seem to be so similar that it’s hard to figure out the differences between them. We often hear this confusion from users and prospects. In a world with so many tools available, how do we figure out which ones are necessary and which are redundant? One of the most common questions we are asked revolves around how Moesif compares to Datadog and how they could work together. We don’t see it as a “Datadog vs Moesif” type of scenario, but instead, see combining the two platforms as a great way to create a top-notch analytics and monitoring stack. Using both can ensure that your systems are running as they should and users are deriving value from the platform. Let’s take a look at each of the platforms, what they do, and how they can work together.
What is Datadog?
Datadog is one of the most popular infrastructure and application monitoring tools on the market. Datadog has plenty of built-in connectors, many that cover different cloud infrastructure monitoring, cost-management, security monitoring, and much more. Overall, Datadog is a great way to monitor the end-to-end health and operations of all your applications and systems. It also includes great visualization tools to easily see trends in your data.
Datadog can help to give end-to-end visibility on:
What is Moesif?
Moesif is an API analytics platform that is mainly focused on how users and companies use your platform. Moesif integrates with your APIs, through a plugin (for many popular API gateway and API management tools) or SDK, and with your applications’ frontend UI. By monitoring both of these angles, Moesif allows users of the platform to see the end-to-end customer journey and derive key insights and trends from that data.
Moesif API analytics can be a great asset for companies that are API-first. It can also be a great tool for product-led organizations that are heavily focused on using metrics to improve and monitor their product.
Moesif can help to give end-to-end visibility on:
- Detailed API usage
- Activation funnels
- Retention and upsell opportunities
- Monetization and quota management
- Feature adoption
Who are the platforms for?
A major factor in the usage of each platform is who the platforms can serve best.
Datadog can service the needs of your DevOps, Site Reliability, and Engineering teams. These teams are concerned about the health of infrastructure and tech operations. Making sure that infrastructure is up and running, efficiently, is of utmost importance.
Moesif caters more to the Product, Engineering, and Customer Support teams where the main concern is about understanding usage and customer satisfaction. Ensuring that users are having great experiences, receiving value from the platform, and retaining those users are the key goals.
As you can see, the platforms can very much work synergistically together. While one is concerned with infrastructure and operational monitoring to make sure users can access the platform, the other is concerned with monitoring user experiences and usage to keep users happy and to help attract new ones with an improved experience.
The metrics: what and why?
The differences between the two platforms can really be looked at based on the metrics they gather, aggregate, and help to understand. Key metrics looked at by users of Datadog include:
- Uptime and SLA
- Memory usage
- Latency
- Errors per minute
- Requests per minute
These metrics give a good idea of infrastructure health and assist with application performance monitoring. This is where Datadog excels. Being able to track specific metrics within a particular user’s journey, though, can be difficult within the platform.
Metrics collected within Moesif have a bit of a different focus than the ones observed in Datadog. The outcomes from the metrics in Moesif can help to support other areas where Datadog can’t or can be complex to implement in Datadog. This is mainly because metrics within Moesif are highly connected and tied to customer behaviour. This means that certain insights can be found because of relationships that can be found within the data for each user and company.
These metrics can help in the areas of:
- Adoption
- Engagement and API usage
- Retention
As you can see, these areas focus on customer success and experience as well as building better products. Put simply, Datadog can help to make sure that your product and services are up and running and Moesif can help to get people using your product and retaining those users.
Creating an analytics and monitoring stack
Analytics and monitoring are extremely complex and multi-faceted. Almost every part of the organization, and every team within, can benefit from a solid foundation of analytics. Leveraging analytics and monitoring to keep operations at their peak efficiency and to ensure products are the best they can be.
The right analytics and monitoring tool can create a cohesive picture for your entire organization.
For your executive, C-suite team analytics can help to show how different efforts throughout the company are being received by users and customers. The ability to tie sales and marketing efforts to specific outcomes that can be easily tracked in the data. This could include sales outreach, improvements in onboarding, or even changes to improve user retention and spending. Leaders within each area can also use concrete numbers to show efforts are working or need to be improved upon.
Sales and Marketing teams, including Developer Relations, can quickly see website and application traffic, its sources, and how various efforts tie into attracting and retaining customers. It’s extremely easy to waste time, effort, and money when trying to scale your user base. Metrics are the key to quickly refining strategy so that waste is minimal and impact of individual campaigns is maximized and that outreach from sales teams is targeted and creates opportunities. This expands beyond just new and incoming customers, but also to current customers who could be upsold to improve their happiness with the product and help your company’s bottom line.
Product Development teams can see how new features are performing, the impact on the infrastructure where these features have been deployed to, and give hints at future improvements to be made. A/B testing can be scrutinized with precise metrics, and individual customer journeys can be followed. Building a better product is not easy, but the formula is to double-down on what’s working and cut anything that isn’t (if it can’t be improved). End-to-end metrics can power this effort.
Operations teams need to know how their infrastructure is performing so they can optimize and keep the customer journey flowing smoothly. A great product needs to be backed up by solid infrastructure. The only way to ensure that things are working as they should is to monitor key metrics and, preferably, put alerts and notifications in place when things are not running optimally.
All of the above uses can be encapsulated in a metrics stack which includes Moesif and Datadog. Moesif can tackle all of the user monitoring and metrics, as well as improve onboarding and retention. Datadog can ensure that all of the infrastructure and operations components of your system are working as they should and alert if they aren’t. With Datadog’s ability to check on things outside of just infrastructure health, such as database health and cloud cost management, to name a few, there’s plenty of room for optimization and monitoring.
Wrapping up
In short, Datadog is focused on operations and making sure that your infrastructure, security, and performance remain stable. If they don’t, Datadog can quickly make your team aware of these critical issues and help with diagnosing and fixing them. Datadog supplies a massive amount of integrations and aesthetically pleasing charts and dashboards. Overall, it’s no surprise why it is one of the most popular infrastructure and platform monitoring solutions on the market. Developers and technical operations staff benefit greatly from using Datadog and all it’s features.
Moesif is focused on making your product and user experience better. The platform has many tools in it that allow you to see a 360 view of who your users are and how they are using your API-driven products. On top of this, Moesif allows you to actually utilize these metrics for automation whether it be alerting your customer success team of issues, enforcing governance policies on endpoints, or even sending emails directly to users based on certain actions or events they are experiencing within your product. Product managers, developers, and even non-technical staff in marketing and sales can leverage Moesif to upgrade their product, customer success, and sales capabilities.
Analytics doesn’t have to apply to only one piece of your application or operation. A complete picture can help to improve your product, improve cost savings efforts, and give the ability to holistically manage everything about your operation, without guessing. These platforms give fine-grained control and insights to be pragmatic and practical when striving to build the best product possible.
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