Which one should you use?

Overview

X-Ray is natively integrated and can be enabled in just a few steps, making it convenient for basic observability needs. It’s a good fit for teams troubleshooting simple workflows or visualizing service dependencies in low-complexity environments. However, it doesn’t capture Lambda payloads and trace data is restricted to what AWS surfaces.

Datadog APM offers deeper visibility than X-Ray. You can enrich traces with business or user context, follow async workflows across services, and capture payloads at every step. It supports custom sampling and retention, letting you dial down ingestion on noisy paths while retaining critical traces longer. This level of control is especially useful for scaling systems and debugging edge cases that are hard to reproduce.

Feature Comparison

Get Started

Enable Datadog Monitoring

If you need the enhanced capabilities that Datadog APM provides, follow these setup guides:

• Serverless monitoring for AWS Lambda
• Serverless monitoring for AWS Step Functions

Enable AWS X-Ray Integration

If AWS X-Ray meets your current requirements, see the AWS X-Ray Integration documentation for detailed setup instructions.