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Change Auditor for Windows File Servers vs Datadog comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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

Change Auditor for Windows ...
Ranking in Log Management
37th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Datadog
Ranking in Log Management
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
208
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Change Auditor for Windows File Servers is 0.5%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 4.1%, down from 6.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog4.1%
Change Auditor for Windows File Servers0.5%
Other95.4%
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

KF
Senior Operations Manager at Procter & Gamble
Provides granular queries of security logs and real-time alerting helps me mitigate risks
The real-time alerting helps me mitigate risks. For example, someone adds a member to the domain admin group. We have an alert set up, so if someone does this unexpectedly, we get notified. Then, we can check and verify if the action is legitimate or a potential threat to the environment.
Dhroov Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution's most valuable aspect is that it can be fully integrated with Microsoft solutions and it doesn't impact the productivity order."
"In terms of features, the querying is great."
"The solution's most valuable aspect is that it can be fully integrated with Microsoft solutions and it doesn't impact the productivity order."
"The APM has made observability and tracing more accessible to developers."
"The ease with which we can filter, use metrics, and give accounts to customers, then let the customer filter, set up metrics, and alerts has been a big win for us."
"The UI, basically, is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"The selection of monitors is a big feature I have been working with."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"When I reflect on the ways we used to track down issues, I can't imagine how we ever managed before Datadog."
"This spectrum of solutions has allowed us to track down bugs faster and more rapidly, which allows us to limit revenue lost during downtime."
"Datadog is far better than any other monitoring tool in introducing any of the new capabilities because they think before Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure before they introduce the concepts."
 

Cons

"The pricing could be improved. It needs to be reduced."
"The pricing could be improved. It needs to be reduced."
"The customer service and support could improve their approach to questioning issues. They tend to ask questions one at a time, which creates a lot of back-and-forth communication."
"The ease of implementation was a bit difficult for us for the database servers where we have different kinds of databases. We needed different kinds of agents to be installed, and that was a bit tricky for us."
"The setup was a bit complex."
"The UI has a lot going on. It should be simpler and have a better way to onboard someone new to using Datadog."
"To be very fair, I haven't had enough experience with Datadog to pick out improvements."
"My suggestion would be to take another look at how the menu structure is put together, however. Even after using the platform mostly every day for months, I still find myself trying to find a service or feature in the menus."
"I love to have some DD guru come in and do a department training directly at our setup."
"I'd like to see better pricing and more integration in the next release."
"Datadog has a lot of features kind of cramped into one dashboard. It's quite hard to get around what feature does exactly what."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is per user. The cost is approximately $15/user on a yearly basis. If you need to, you can always upgrade as well."
"The tool is open-source."
"Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."
"Datadog does not provide any free plans to use the solution. When I start with a proof of concept it would be sensible to have a free plan to test the tool and check whether it fits the requirements of the project. Before the production stage, it is always good to have a free plan with some limited features, number of requests, or logs."
"The pricing came up a bit compared to their competitors. It is not that the price has risen, but that the competitors have gone down. They keep adding more features that I would have expected to be baked in at a more nominal price. I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the pricing, but not enough to jump ship."
"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."
"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"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."
"The pricing and licensing through AWS Marketplace has been good. It would be nice if it was cheaper, but their pricing is reasonable for what it is. Sometimes, for their newer features, they charge as if it's fully fleshed out, even though it is a newer feature and it may have less stuff than their other items."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business81
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise99
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Change Auditor for Windows File Servers?
They've already made improvements! They have a tool called IT Security Search, which lets you perform queries outside of Change Auditor. It's much faster. This is a really good addition and helps u...
What is your primary use case for Change Auditor for Windows File Servers?
I use Change Auditor for Windows File Servers to log history. It's helpful when we have critical changes in Active Directory, like adding or removing items. I use it extensively for monitoring.
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 ...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Dragon Capital, Howard County MD
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Change Auditor for Windows File Servers vs. Datadog and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
886,932 professionals have used our research since 2012.