Harness Service Reliability Management vs DataDog

Summary:

Harness and DataDog both provide SLO management capabilities. Harness Service Reliability Management (SRM) is a SLO management module that is part of a larger software delivery (CI/CD) platform. Harness SRM is designed to facilitate greater collaboration between SREs and Developers while also automating many actions related to SLO management like governing software deployments.

DataDog is a monitoring and observability vendor that provides some basic SLO management capabilities. DataDog’s SLO management features can be useful to SRE teams but it does not provide automation across the software delivery lifecycle as evident in the following analysis.

SaaS & On-Premises:

Harness SRM is available as either SaaS or self-managed software that can be deployed anywhere.

DataDog is available as a SaaS solution only.

Integrates with leading observability solutions:

Harness SRM integrates with many of the leading monitoring, logging, and observability solutions to collect the data needed to build and track SLIs, SLOs, and Error Budgets.

Since DataDog is mainly a monitoring and observability solution, it does not integrate with many other competing products.

Custom Reliability Policies:

Harness SRM contains a built in policy engine based on Open Policy Agent (OPA). This enables Harness users to define and enforce custom policies with via UI or via policy-as-code. Policies within Harness can be used to send notifications or to actively manage software delivery pipelines via reliability guardrails.

DataDog offers the ability to create policies for notification purposes only.

Reliability Guardrails integrated with CI/CD pipelines:

Harness SRM reliability guardrail policies are used to automatically determine if deployment pipelines should proceed or stop given the status of SLOs an Error Budgets. This makes it possible to effectively standardize and scale the management of pipelines via SLO management processes.

DataDog does not offer this capability.

Service Health Indicators:

Harness SRM can determine and display the health of application services using SLOs and/or metrics to derive the overall health. By using a combination of SLOs and metrics, Harness can provide a more precise calculation of service health.

DataDog does not provide service health indications based upon SLOs.

Automated Deployment Verification and Rollback (Continuous Verification):

Continuous Verification is the process of monitoring your app for abnormalities after a deployment. For example, Continuous Verification could catch a latency issue or 5xx errors and automatically roll back your app to the previous version. The idea is to catch errors as quickly as possible – ideally, before customers notice – and make a seamless transition back to the prior version.

Harness provides Continuous Verification out of the box, effectively reducing risk and reputational damage from downtime. Harness supports many vendors, including Prometheus, Datadog, AppDynamics, New Relic, StackDriver, CloudWatch, and custom monitoring and observability tools.

DataDog does not offer this capability. They are a monitoring solution that can be used to analyze the quality of software services over time.

Correlation of Change Events to Service Health:

Harness SRM ingests change events and shows them on a timeline that is aligned with SLO and Error Budget charts. The user can select and drill down into specific timeframes to perform root cause analysis on the impacted SLOs.

DataDog does not offer this capability.

Correlation of Incidents to Service Health:

Harness SRM ingests incident events and shows them on a timeline that is aligned with SLO and Error Budget charts. The user can select and drill down into specific timeframes to perform root cause analysis on the impacted SLOs.

DataDog does not offer this capability.

Fine-Grained Role-Based Access Control:

Harness enables full customization of role based access controls (RBAC) with the SRM module and across the larger platform. Harness RBAC was built to offer the ultimate in flexibility as required by the largest enterprises.

DataDog does have an RBAC system but it has limited roles related to SLO management.

Unified Software Delivery Platform:

Harness SRM is the SLO management module of the Harness Software Delivery Platform. Each module can be used standalone (integrated as a best of breed solution to a DevOps toolchain) or as part of the platform. When used as part of the platform, each module passes meta-data and can provide greater levels of automation than if used standalone.

DataDog does not offer a unified software delivery platform.

*Please note: Our competitors, just like us, release updates to their products on a regular cadence. We keep these pages updated to the best of our ability, but there are bound to be discrepancies. For the most up-to-date information on competitor features, browsing the competitor’s new release pages and communities are your best bet.

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