Azure Network Watcher vs Datadog comparison

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Azure Network Watcher

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

Datadog and Azure Network Watcher are both competing in the monitoring tools category. Datadog holds an upper hand with its rich features and seamless integration capabilities, appealing to cloud environments.

Features: Datadog's valuable features include sharable dashboards, seamless alerting, and easy integration with cloud services. Its ability to handle large amounts of data and provide intuitive tagging makes it easy to create monitors, enhancing efficiency. Azure Network Watcher provides essential network monitoring tools such as typology visualization, connection troubleshooter, and packet capture options, focusing on connectivity and security.

Room for Improvement: Datadog users suggest improvements in historical data performance, cost predictability, and query performance. They would like to see expanded AI capabilities within the tool. Azure Network Watcher could improve its documentation, incorporate more built-in applications for detailed traffic analysis, and integrate with Wireshark for enhanced packet capture analysis.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Datadog's flexible deployment across private, public, and hybrid cloud environments coupled with responsive customer service gives it an advantage. Azure Network Watcher is specifically tailored for public cloud environments and is praised for its user-friendly design, although there is room for improvement in service responsiveness.

Pricing and ROI: Datadog is considered expensive but delivers a positive ROI through significant operational efficiencies and comprehensive features. Azure Network Watcher offers affordable pricing for standard usage, but costs can escalate with detailed matrices. Its ROI primarily focuses on optimizing network management.

To learn more, read our detailed Azure Network Watcher vs. Datadog Report (Updated: April 2026).

Azure Network Watcher vs. Datadog

April 2026

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Azure Network Watcher

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

42nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Datadog

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

4th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

210

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Azure Network Watcher is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 2.4%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Datadog	2.4%
Azure Network Watcher	0.5%
Other	97.1%

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Bijoyendra Roychowdhury

Program Manager at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

Network monitoring provides comprehensive analytics while the interface requires further development

The quality of Azure Network Watcher is quite good in terms of the in-depth analysis you can create from these matrices. There are other monitoring tools such as New Relic, AppDynamics, and Dynatrace which provide very detailed network tracing. Cloud providers such as Azure or AWS do not have that kind of GUI-based capability at this point, but using PowerShell or Python, you can develop it yourself. From the GUI perspective, it still needs to evolve in terms of quality and standard, though overall, it is quite good for troubleshooting. Regarding areas for improvement, when comparing to other network tools beyond Azure Monitor or Azure Network Watcher, those tools can identify single failed packets. This level of granularity is not currently possible with cloud providers as they only go to a certain level rather than the granular level needed for deep troubleshooting, though they do provide hints with available matrices.

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Dhroov Patel

Site Reliability Engineer at Grainger

Has improved incident response with better root cause visibility and supports flexible on-call scheduling

Datadog needs to introduce more hard limits to cost. If we see a huge log spike, administrators should have more control over what happens to save costs. If a service starts logging extensively, I want the ability to automatically direct that log into the cheapest log bucket. This should be the case with many offerings. If we're seeing too much APM, we need to be aware of it and able to stop it rather than having administrators reach out to specific teams. Datadog has become significantly slower over the last year. They could improve performance at the risk of slowing down feature work. More resources need to go into Fleet Automation because we face many problems with things such as the Ansible role to install Datadog in non-containerized hosts. We mainly want to see performance improvements, less time spent looking at costs, the ability to trust that costs will stay reasonable, and an easier way to manage our agents. It is such a powerful tool with much potential on the horizon, but cost control, performance, and agent management need improvement. The main issues are with the administrative side rather than the actual application.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This will help the company or the administrator, by helping them see how the traffic moves, to make sure that no entities are having any communication issues or different endpoints with task issues."

"The most valuable feature of Azure Network Watcher is the cloud-native application firewall, which is helpful for securing databases."

"We use the solution to monitor network services. It helps to capture any network issues."

"The most valuable feature of Azure Network Watcher is using the gateways with the connections. The monitoring is useful for the logs and application insights into the data. The traffic filtering issues when it comes to deploying those applications are helpful."

"This is a stable system providing stable performance."

"What I like most about Azure Network Watcher is that it's focused more on the architecture. I also like that it has a packet capture feature that tells you how the packet travels and whether it's exiting Azure, etc."

"The solution is stable."

"My advice to others looking into using Azure Network Watcher is to go for it, as you'll have the tool by default when you're subscribed to Azure VNet."

More Azure Network Watcher pros

"APM and tracing are super useful."

"Real user monitoring gives us invaluable insights into actual user experiences, helping us prioritize improvements where they matter most."

"Since we started using the product, we were able to create dashboards, and utilize APM, continuous profiling, RUM, and distributed tracing for production support and user trends."

"Synthetic testing is by far the most valuable feature in our organization."

"If we have a large load for users using our basic Datadog, it will immediately fire off an alert notifying us either something's wrong or not."

"This is definitely a good product and I would consider them one of the leaders within the application monitoring and cloud monitoring space."

"Datadog has impacted our organization positively because the general feeling is that it's superior to the ELK stack that we used to use, being significantly faster in searching and filtering the information down, as well as providing links to our search criteria that our development teams and cloud operations teams can use to look at the same problems without having to set up their own search and filter criteria."

"The visibility into our network has allowed for quick diagnosis of failures, identification of underutilized or over-utilized resources, and allowed for cloud cost optimization opportunities."

More Datadog pros

Cons

"There are some occasional downtimes, but these were based on Azure-specific issues."

"Technical support from Microsoft needs significant improvement compared to other product vendors."

"User experience could be improved."

"Sometimes, you encounter a VPN tunnel, network, or routing issue, but finding out more about the blockage is challenging."

"I would like to see in the future if we can troubleshoot as a firewall because it is equipment as a network player and some diagnostics."

"Azure Network Watcher needs to have better documentation and it needs to capture information accurately."

"The initial setup and initial learning curve could be improved to be easier."

"Azure is good, however, the Fortinet GUI is more intuitive and I like it more than anything else."

More Azure Network Watcher cons

"The real issue with this product is cost control."

"Delta traces on the Golang profiler are extremely expensive concerning memory utilization."

"Datadog does not have the feature where you can monitor external websites or check the SSL secure for websites."

"Other than being restricted by cost, Datadog's scalability has been a little bit of a challenge to do the initial installation of the agent."

"The Log Explorer could be better. I don't think it has log manipulation as Splunk does."

"I'm not sure what kind of features are in the roadmap right now, but I encourage the development of features for defining your organization, and allowing the visibility of what kind of metrics you can get. Those features would be really useful for us."

"Particularly as Datadog starts offering more platform capabilities like APM, Watchdog, shift left initiatives like instrumentation, continuous testing, intelligent test runner, and Synthetic and real user monitoring, the UI can become more and more clunky, giving users a very frustrating experience."

"Even though it is powerful on its own, the UI-based design lacks elegance, efficiency, and complexity."

More Datadog cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Price-wise, I have no information on how much Azure Network Watcher costs."

"The price of the solution is reasonable."

"The pricing is good. It's not too expensive."

"Azure Network Watcher is a little bit expensive."

"Pricing is somewhat affordable compared to other solutions but in order to really lower the costs of other products you need to plan very carefully your resources usage, otherwise, it can get expensive real quick."

"The price is better than some competing products."

"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."

"They prefer monthly subscriptions."

"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."

"Sometimes it's very hard to project how much it will cost for the monthly subscription for the next month when you add certain features. Having better visibility of the cost would give a better experience."

"It has always scaled for us. Cost scales up too, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. It's reasonable for what they're providing."

"It is easy to run up a large bill, so become familiar with the cost of each piece of your bill and use the metrics they supply to estimate and monitor your bill."

More Datadog pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Construction Company

10%

Government

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Large Enterprise	7

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	82
Midsize Enterprise	47
Large Enterprise	100

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Network Watcher?

I do not have the exact setup cost information on hand, but it is available in the public Azure portal. You can access the calculator there to get detailed pricing information.

What needs improvement with Azure Network Watcher?

The main area for improvement is AI-based features. Currently, many intelligent tools are coming from third parties, and Azure Network Watcher needs to improve in this area. The focus should be on ...

What is your primary use case for Azure Network Watcher?

Azure Network Watcher is used for monitoring network traffic. It provides insight into egress and ingress traffic, which helps determine whether consumption can be controlled. Most Azure services c...

Any advice about APM solutions?

There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...

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 times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...

Which would you choose - Datadog or Dynatrace?

Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Dynatrace. Dynatrace offers network ...

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Product Reports

Download Azure Network Watcher product report

Azure Network Watcher

May 2026

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May 2026

Overview

Azure Network Watcher provides advanced network monitoring capabilities including packet capture, cloud-native firewall, and traffic diagnosis, aiding in VPN troubleshooting and security enforcement with enhanced visibility and alerting features.

Azure Network Watcher is essential for monitoring, diagnosing, and analyzing network traffic. It efficiently handles VPN connection issues and enhances network security by capturing and analyzing traffic to assess performance or latency problems. The tool facilitates traffic flow control, security rule verification, and bandwidth monitoring. Users benefit from its capabilities in diagnosing service connections, offering insights into network activity, and identifying potential threats, crucial for maintaining compliance and efficient network management.

What are the key features of Azure Network Watcher?

Packet Capture: Enables detailed network traffic inspection to troubleshoot issues.
Cloud-Native Application Firewall: Provides enhanced protection for applications running in the cloud.
Traffic Monitoring: Allows for real-time analysis and troubleshooting of network traffic.
NSG Flow Logs & AI-Based Monitoring: Enhances flow control and threat detection.
Alerting & Threshold Configuration: Offers customizable alerts via Azure Monitor for proactive management.

What benefits can users look for in reviews?

Improved Network Security: Helps in identifying and mitigating threats efficiently.
Enhanced Visibility: Provides clear insights into network operations and potential issues.
Compliance Support: Assists in maintaining regulatory compliance with thorough monitoring capabilities.
Effective Bandwidth Management: Facilitates control and optimization of network bandwidth.

In industries like finance and healthcare, Azure Network Watcher is implemented to ensure robust security and compliance, crucial for safeguarding sensitive data. It aids retail and manufacturing sectors in optimizing network performance and maintaining seamless connectivity, supporting their digital infrastructure needs.

Microsoft

Datadog integrates extensive monitoring solutions with features like customizable dashboards and real-time alerting, supporting efficient system management. Its seamless integration capabilities with tools like AWS and Slack make it a critical part of cloud infrastructure monitoring.

Datadog offers centralized logging and monitoring, making troubleshooting fast and efficient. It facilitates performance tracking in cloud environments such as AWS and Azure, utilizing tools like EC2 and APM for service management. Custom metrics and alerts improve the ability to respond to issues swiftly, while real-time tools enhance system responsiveness. However, users express the need for improved query performance, a more intuitive UI, and increased integration capabilities. Concerns about the pricing model's complexity have led to calls for greater transparency and control, and additional advanced customization options are sought. Datadog's implementation requires attention to these aspects, with enhanced documentation and onboarding recommended to reduce the learning curve.

What are Datadog's Key Features?

Sharable Dashboards: Facilitate collaboration with customizable, intuitive dashboards.
Extensive Integrations: Seamlessly connects with tools like Slack and AWS to support workflows.
APM and RUM: Provides deep insights into application performance and user interactions.
Real-Time Tools: Enables agile responses to system issues with real-time monitoring.
Unified Tagging and Visualization: Eases management of complex systems with simplified visualization.

What Benefits and ROI Should Users Look For?

Efficient Troubleshooting: Centralized logging speeds up the identification and resolution of issues.
Streamlined Workflows: Integrations with popular tools enhance operational efficiency.
Improved Observability: Comprehensive monitoring improves system reliability and performance.
Resource Optimization: Efficient microservices and container management leads to better cloud resource utilization.
Responsive Alerts: Customizable alerts ensure timely identification of critical issues.

In industries like finance and technology, Datadog is implemented for its monitoring capabilities across cloud architectures. Its ability to aggregate logs and provide a unified view enhances reliability in environments demanding high performance. By leveraging real-time insights and integration with platforms like AWS and Azure, organizations in these sectors efficiently manage their cloud infrastructures, ensuring optimal performance and proactive issue resolution.

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

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