Prometheus is just a storage engine, with a debugging page to display one metrics (it's what you'd get if you did a one week hackathon to make a metrics system

Prometheus is just a storage engine, with a debugging page to display one metrics (it's what you'd get if you did a one week hackathon to make a metrics system really). Datadog is a complete solution to collect metrics, visualize, dashboards, search and alerting. There is really no comparison possible (if datadog is a car, prometheus is an engine). Prometheus is easy to setup but it barely does anything. It gets really messy when one needs to gather application metrics (postgresql, cassandra, haproxy, java, etc...) and have dashboards and alerts going to different places (slack, email, etc...). Trying to find and combine a variety of plugins and open source tools to fill the gaps. Any company irrelevant of size should have a metrics/dashboard/monitoring/alerting solution. IMO datadog because it's better in all aspects. If the company doesn't want to pay or doesn't want SaaS, it should at least setup prometheus to have basic system metrics somewhere, rather than flying blind.