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Cisco Crosswork Network Insights vs Datadog 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Crosswork Network Ins...
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
51st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
4
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 Cisco Crosswork Network Insights is 0.2%. 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
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog2.4%
Cisco Crosswork Network Insights0.2%
Other97.4%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

James  Scot - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Specialist at FedEx
Automation has transformed endpoint deployment and streamlines multi-vendor network operations
The best features that Cisco Crosswork Network Insights offers include a single pane of glass, multi-vendor comparison, and the ability to reduce engineer workload. The single pane of glass and multi-vendor comparison features help my team day-to-day because with the single pane of glass, we are able to manage everything at a single place, hence saving a lot of time, and the administration becomes very easy. Additionally, there is real-time network monitoring and analytics, multi-vendor and multi-domain support, scalable AI-driven insights to make data-driven decisions easy, and a modular application ecosystem with open APIs. Cisco Crosswork Network Insights has empowered our team to deploy network devices at customer locations more efficiently than ever before, and it also delivers critical network telemetry, streamlining troubleshooting and reducing reliance on manual processes. Cisco Crosswork Network Insights has positively impacted my organization by enhancing automation for endpoint deployment, hence saving a lot of time, and network usage statistics delivery to the end user's environment has been quicker.
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

"Cisco Crosswork Network Insights has impacted my organization positively as it has saved a lot of time, reduced management overhead, and simplified operations through a single pane of glass."
"Cisco Crosswork Network Insights has positively impacted us by securing our data, including customer data, and it secures our cybersecurity products while being excellent for security purposes."
"Cisco Crosswork Network Insights has positively impacted my organization primarily through security and trust, as it provides monitoring of routing health, IP health, and protection from hijacks or leaks."
"Cisco Crosswork Network Insights has been very fundamental and robust and helpful in my organization, empowering our team to deploy network devices at customer locations more efficiently than ever, and it also delivers critical network telemetry, streamlining troubleshooting and reducing reliance on manual processes."
"Datadog's visibility and debugging features help me day-to-day; specifically, we had an application that was throwing a bunch of errors causing an issue in our production database, and using Datadog, we were able to immediately isolate the error and plan around it."
"I like Datadog because it is so easy use, I can easily connect to public clouds, and I have a view of observability."
"While my team is relatively new to Datadog, I already see immense value in switching over to Datadog as the primary APM and NPM tool."
"From the number of outages stopped or shortened (which lead to lost revenue from non-renewals) and the number of hours saved on investigations (which correlates to engineering salaries), I estimate that the ROI of the implementation time and monthly charges to be between 10x and 20x."
"Datadog has positively impacted our organization by allowing us to look at things such as Cloud Spend and make sure our services are running at an optimal performance level."
"Datadog provides a lot of value in terms of adding monitoring and observability to our app."
"The integration and configuration are incredibly simple. The SaaS offering is remarkably easy to set up, especially if you're coming from a Graphite environment or anything that uses a StatsD."
"The CCM, Workflows, Logs, APM, and RUM are all useful aspects of the solution."
 

Cons

"There are aspects of Cisco Crosswork Network Insights that I feel need improvement, such as faster data processing, as it currently takes too much time."
"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is somewhat high compared to other network products similar to Cisco."
"I have not seen a return on investment yet; we are still working on it."
"Cisco Crosswork Network Insights is not an easy-to-use product and thus requires some training to ensure that it can be used to the best of its capabilities."
"Learning about the tooling could also be improved. It is a bit clunky to use, especially in an incident."
"I'm still exploring the trial version, and it is fine. One thing that I haven't been able to figure out is how to retrieve a report. This is something that could be improved. I probably need to navigate to a place to access the reports."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big. Datadog needs to provide better pricing for large customers."
"There are some areas on log filtering screens where the user interface can take some getting used to."
"We need to learn more about the session reply feature inside of DD."
"There are things about it that we would like to be fixed, such as it is taking averages of average. This results in data that we don't expect, but overall we are happy with it."
"The real issue with this product is cost control."
"I'd rate Datadog support four out of 10. It was primarily an issue with support in the Asia-Pacific region."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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."
"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"The price is better than some competing products."
"At my last company, we did see ROI, specifically around response time. We could get to mission critical things that were down and losing revenue on immediately. So, the product paid itself back."
"This solution is budget friendly."
"I am not satisfied with its licensing. Its payment is based on the exported data, and there was an explosion of the data for three or four weeks. My customer was not alerted, and there was no way for them to see that there has been an explosion of data. They got a big invoice for one or two months. The pricing model of Datadog is based on the data. The customer was quite surprised about not being alerted about this explosion of data. They should provide some kind of alert when there is an increase in usage."
"It has a module-based pricing model."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
46%
Healthcare Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise47
Large Enterprise100
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Crosswork Network Insights?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the prices are good.
What needs improvement with Cisco Crosswork Network Insights?
Cisco Crosswork Network Insights is not an easy tool to use. It is not an easy-to-use product and thus requires some training to ensure that it can be used to the best of its capabilities.
What is your primary use case for Cisco Crosswork Network Insights?
My main use case for Cisco Crosswork Network Insights is that we deployed it to automate the workloads for our service provider environment, and we are going to eventually manage 700 plus endpoints...
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

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Crosswork Network Insights vs. Datadog and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
894,807 professionals have used our research since 2012.