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Amazon CloudWatch vs Datadog vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.1
Amazon CloudWatch offers cost savings and control, aiding compliance but challenges remain in quantifying returns during cloud migrations.
Sentiment score
7.1
Organizations experienced diverse returns with Datadog, reporting time savings, reduced blindspots, enhanced visibility, integration benefits, and efficiency improvements.
Sentiment score
7.2
SolarWinds NPM enhances infrastructure visibility, delivering cost reductions, faster issue resolution, and significant ROI through optimized resource management.
Amazon CloudWatch offers cost-saving advantages by being an inbuilt solution that requires no separate setup or maintenance for monitoring tasks.
The return on investment is significant as the solution effectively reduces costs while being worth its expense.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.4
Amazon CloudWatch support is generally praised for responsiveness and expertise, though experiences and costs vary by support package.
Sentiment score
7.3
Datadog customer service is responsive and professional, offering proactive support despite occasional delays in their ticket system.
Sentiment score
6.9
SolarWinds NPM support gets mixed reviews, praised for expertise yet noted for delays and aggressive sales tactics.
While using their cloud and cloud resources, if you have an issue with CloudWatch, you must pay additional monthly fees to get time from dedicated tech support.
In recent years, due to business expansion, knowledge levels among support engineers seem to vary.
If there is no timely response, getting a resolution is more difficult.
We had contact with SolarWinds regarding the implementation, and they were helpful.
They have good technical support.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Amazon CloudWatch is praised for its scalability, managing large workloads effortlessly and adapting to diverse performance monitoring needs.
Sentiment score
7.6
Datadog scales efficiently with diverse technologies, though rising costs and limited API capabilities remain concerns for some users.
Sentiment score
6.9
SolarWinds NPM is scalable, adapts well to infrastructures, but may face performance and cost issues on virtual platforms.
Amazon CloudWatch's scalability is managed by AWS.
SolarWinds NPM is scalable and effective in handling large network infrastructures.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon CloudWatch is reliable and stable, though users experience occasional logging delays and minor complexities in query customization.
Sentiment score
8.0
Datadog offers reliable performance with minimal downtime, resolving integration issues promptly and maintaining consistent uptime even during peak traffic.
Sentiment score
7.5
SolarWinds NPM is stable with issues from server limits and bugs, resolved through updates and proper configuration.
I sometimes notice slowness when Amazon CloudWatch agents are installed on machines with less capacity, causing me to use other monitoring tools.
The NPM product is stable, particularly when used for simple network monitoring.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon CloudWatch needs enhancements in customization, log management, pricing, integrations, data visibility, and user interface for better performance.
Datadog struggles with performance, usability, and cost issues, requiring improvements in integration, documentation, and user interface.
SolarWinds NPM users report issues with network discovery, UI features, costs, automation, support, and security improvements are needed.
When using third-party dashboards such as Kibana or Grafana and other visualization tools, there should be a way to feed CloudWatch's data and logging capabilities into these visualization tools.
Amazon CloudWatch charges extra for custom metrics, which is a significant disadvantage.
Maybe Amazon Web Services can improve by providing a library for CloudWatch with some useful features.
The documentation is adequate, but team members coming into a project could benefit from more guided, interactive tutorials, ideally leveraging real-world data.
There should be a clearer view of the expenses.
Customers have given feedback about the delayed response times from the technical team.
SolarWinds needs to upscale on observability and add full-fledged observability features, including security features.
Features such as taking backup of the devices or configurations of the devices can be included in further versions of SolarWinds NPM.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon CloudWatch pricing is usage-based, often cost-effective, but may increase with data use and custom metrics.
Datadog's pricing model is flexible yet can be costly, requiring careful planning to optimize its comprehensive features and avoid surprises.
SolarWinds NPM pricing varies by setup size, with initial costs, tiered licensing, and maintenance fees influencing total expenses.
Overall, the pricing of Amazon CloudWatch is very expensive.
Amazon CloudWatch charges more for custom metrics as well as for changes in the timeline.
The setup cost for Datadog is more than $100.
PRTG's package offers all features in one bundle, which is cost-effective.
The solution is considered expensive.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon CloudWatch offers metrics, alerts, automation, and analytics with seamless AWS integration, scalability, and third-party service support.
Datadog excels in integration, monitoring, and data visualization, enhancing system reliability and efficiency with seamless AWS synchronization.
SolarWinds NPM offers ease of deployment, real-time monitoring, customizable alerts, and user-friendly design for efficient network management.
Being an inbuilt solution from AWS, it saves time on installation, setup, and maintenance.
The best features of Amazon CloudWatch need to improve visibility into the network because when using hundreds of network resources such as transit gateway, VPNs, routers, route tables, and firewalls, it does not give many details in a structured manner.
I like its filtering capability and its ability to give the cyber engine insights.
Our architecture is written in several languages, and one area where Datadog particularly shines is in providing first-class support for a multitude of programming languages.
The technology itself is generally very useful.
It provides a detailed overview of the network, which is valuable.
SolarWinds NPM has specific modules for monitoring different network capabilities, which provides rich features for carrying out specific tasks.
The most valuable feature for us is the database performance analyzer, which we use a lot.
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudWatch is 2.4%, down from 3.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 9.4%, down from 13.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 4.2%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Rahul Kundu - PeerSpot reviewer
Proactively address issues with seamless monitoring while enhancing custom metrics functionality
We use CloudWatch for monitoring and logging. It helps us monitor our applications' performance, particularly in ensuring that every API hit returns a response within four seconds, which is our SLA. We also monitor invocation errors in Lambda and use CloudWatch alerts to notify us of any issues…
Kevin Palmer - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful log aggregation and management with helpful metrics aggregation
Datadog provides us value in three major ways: First, Datadog provides best-in-class functionality in many, if not all, of the products to which we subscribe (infrastructure, APM, log management, serverless, synthetics, real user monitoring, DB monitoring). In my experience with other tools that provide similar functionality, Datadog provides the largest feature set with the most flexibility and the best performance. Second, Datadog allows us to access all of those services in one place. Having to learn and manage only one tool for all of those purposes is a major benefit. Third, Datadog provides significant connectivity between those services so that we can view, summarize, organize, translate and correlate our data with maximum effect. Not needing to manually integrate them to draw lines between those pieces of information is a huge time savings for us.
Masud Alam - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers alerting service to trigger alerts and easy to manage
For end-user performance monitoring, we like features such as availability of our all devices and device/interface monitoring. We have also used NCM (Network Configuration Manager) for our network. We use the alerting service to trigger alerts based on specific thresholds, like CPU or memory utilization exceeding a certain percentage. There are AI network initiatives in SolarWinds NPM for some lengthy issues. For example, it shows availability reports. But for bandwidth monitoring, it's not very clear how much bandwidth is being consumed. SolarWinds provide real-time bandwidth monitoring. It is not difficult to manage the network with SolarWinds. We have one customer with a satellite location. If we have a large network with, let's say, 43,000 elements, and our current SolarWinds license supports only 30,000, we would need to create another polling engine to accommodate the additional 13,000 elements. It's limited to the polling engine, so we can only support 30,000 elements per engine. So it's only for 30,000, but we have at least 40,000 elements in our network.
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 31, 2015
Nagios vs. Zabbix vs. PRTG vs. Spiceworks vs. Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor
I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Real Estate/Law Firm
5%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Educational Organization
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
16%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon CloudWatch?
Overall, the pricing of Amazon CloudWatch is very expensive.
What needs improvement with Amazon CloudWatch?
Apart from traceability of network resources, Amazon CloudWatch needs to be more interoperable with other tools becau...
Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems,...
Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several time...
Which would you choose - Datadog or Dynatrace?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was t...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
It actually depends on the exact purpose or kind of devices (network devices, servers, something else). Some tools ar...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
We are partners with SolarWinds and we sell a lot of Network management to large enterprises also because of scalabil...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
No data available
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AirAsia, Airbnb, Aircel, APUS, Avazu, Casa & Video, Futbol Club Barcelona (FCBarcelona), National Taiwan University, redBus
Adobe, Samsung, facebook, HP Cloud Services, Electronic Arts, salesforce, Stanford University, CiTRIX, Chef, zendesk, Hearst Magazines, Spotify, mercardo libre, Slashdot, Ziff Davis, PBS, MLS, The Motley Fool, Politico, Barneby's
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Datadog, Microsoft and others in Cloud Monitoring Software. Updated: July 2025.
862,077 professionals have used our research since 2012.