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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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.0
Cisco Crosswork Network Insights boosts efficiency by reducing manual work and enhancing network performance, offering time-saving benefits.
Sentiment score
6.4
Datadog improves efficiency by reducing response time, optimizing resources, enhancing reliability, and saving costs through better infrastructure monitoring.
We have saved 70% of manual work, reduced the number of employees needed for this task, and saved significant time, which has improved our efficiency and productivity by around 50%.
Student at Rochester Institute of Technology
I have seen a return on investment because Cisco Crosswork Network Insights has enhanced automation for endpoint deployment, hence saving a lot of time.
Project Specialist at FedEx
Cisco Crosswork Network Insights is quite a comprehensive product with very few errors and enhanced network performance.
Manager, Project Implementation at ibl-unisys
Previously we had thirteen contractors doing the monitoring for us, which is now reduced to only five.
IT Manager at Liberty Mutual Insurance
Datadog has delivered more than its value through reduced downtime, faster recovery, and infrastructure optimization.
Sr. Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
We have also seen fewer escalations for minor issues because alerts help us catch problems earlier, which indirectly reduces downtime and improves overall efficiency.
Network Security Consultant at NTT DATA
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.8
Cisco Crosswork Network Insights' customer support is praised for responsiveness, effectiveness, quick hardware fixes, and minimal disruption.
Sentiment score
6.7
Datadog's customer service is generally reliable and efficient, with recent improvements noted, despite occasional delays and communication issues.
They are also very responsive during physical meetings, especially when RCA is required.
Solution Architect at Dhanyaayai enterprise private limited
The customer support is very proactive and responsive compared to other competitors.
Project Specialist at FedEx
It does not require too much analysis; if something is not working, it needs to be replaced, which makes it faster and easier.
Manager, Project Implementation at ibl-unisys
When I have additional questions, the ticket is updated with actual recommendations or suggestions pointing me in the correct direction.
Applications Web Services Technical Engineer at Ace Hardware
Overall, the entire Datadog comprehensive experience of support, onboarding, getting everything in there, and having a good line of feedback has been exceptional.
Systems Administrator at Townsquare Interactive
I've had a couple instances where I reached out to Datadog's support team, and they have been really super helpful and very kind, even reaching back out after resolving my issues to check if everything's going well.
Security Engineer at Invitation Homes
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
4.4
Cisco Crosswork Network Insights efficiently manages scalability, supporting complex environments with strong performance and helpful documentation for stability.
Sentiment score
7.5
Datadog excels in scalable performance and integration but requires careful ingestion cost management as environments grow.
Cisco Crosswork Network Insights supports large and complex environments.
Project Specialist at FedEx
In terms of scalability, Cisco Crosswork Network Insights performs very well in both UAT and production.
Solution Architect at Dhanyaayai enterprise private limited
Datadog's scalability has been great as it has been able to grow with our needs.
IT Manager at Liberty Mutual Insurance
Since it is a SaaS platform, we did not have to worry about backend scaling.
Network Security Consultant at NTT DATA
We have not faced any major performance issues from the platform side; it handles increased metrics and monitoring loads smoothly.
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.6
Cisco Crosswork Network Insights is highly stable and dependable, with excellent customer service, leading to strong user satisfaction.
Sentiment score
8.0
Datadog is praised for stability and reliability, with rare, quickly-resolved issues, especially during peak traffic periods.
Metrics collection and alerting have been consistent in day-to-day use.
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
Datadog is very stable, as there hasn't been any downtime or issues since I've been here, and it's always on time.
Security Engineer at Invitation Homes
Datadog seems stable in my experience without any downtime or reliability issues.
Full Stack Developer at Townsquare Interactive
 

Room For Improvement

Users seek improved usability, AI enhancements, better third-party integration, cost efficiency, and more insightful documentation for Cisco Crosswork Network Insights.
Datadog needs better alert management, cost control, data representation, API consistency, integration, security, automation, navigation, and educational resources.
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.
Project Specialist at FedEx
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.
Student at Rochester Institute of Technology
Cisco Crosswork Network Insights can improve in its setup complexity, as it has a very complex setup that requires skilled network engineers for deployment and tuning.
Solution Architect at Dhanyaayai enterprise private limited
It would be great to see stronger AI-driven anomaly detection and predictive analytics to help identify potential issues before they impact performance.
Operations Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
We want to be able to customize the cost part, and we would appreciate more granular access control.
Service Manager at PwC
Having more transparent and granular cost control features would make it easier to manage usage.
Network Security Consultant at NTT DATA
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users find Cisco Crosswork Network Insights costly but worthwhile for high usage, with pricing starting at $1000.
Datadog offers scalable, usage-based pricing but requires careful monitoring to manage escalating costs and optimize feature utilization.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is somewhat high compared to other network products similar to Cisco.
Senior system engineer at Honeywell
For higher usage, it may be less expensive, with retail offerings around $1000 and $10 per IP prefix for the first 100 prefixes.
Student at Rochester Institute of Technology
The prices are good.
Project Specialist at FedEx
The setup cost for Datadog is more than $100.
Senior Performance and Architecture Analyst at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Pricing is mainly based on data ingestion, such as logs, metrics, and traces, and it can increase quickly if everything is enabled by default.
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
Everybody wants the agent installed, but we only have so many dollars to spread across, so it's been difficult for me to prioritize who will benefit from Datadog at this time.
Applications Web Services Technical Engineer at Ace Hardware
 

Valuable Features

Cisco Crosswork Network Insights enhances network management with AI-driven insights, real-time analytics, and robust security, improving efficiency and integration.
Datadog enhances operational efficiency with unified visibility, integration, customizable dashboards, and comprehensive monitoring across cloud platforms.
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.
Project Specialist at FedEx
The best features Cisco Crosswork Network Insights offers include its effectiveness in alerting and automations, visualization dashboards, and its suitability for banking organizations, telecom providers, or any large enterprises that heavily work with networking and security needs.
Solution Architect at Dhanyaayai enterprise private limited
The real-time insights and analysis features are valuable to me because they alleviate worries about hijackings on routing by providing real-time updates if something unusual occurs on routing paths using machine learning.
Student at Rochester Institute of Technology
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.
Senior Software Engineer at Los Angeles Times Communications, LLC
Having all that associated analytics helps me in troubleshooting by not having to bounce around to other tools, which saves me a lot of time.
Senior Site Reliability Engineer at a wholesaler/distributor with 5,001-10,000 employees
Datadog was able to find the alerts and trigger to notify our team in a very prompt manner before it got worse, allowing us to promptly adjust and remediate the situation in time.
Security Engineer at Invitation Homes
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Crosswork Network Ins...
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
35th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Datadog
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
211
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) (6th), AI Observability (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Cisco Crosswork Network Insights is 0.2%. The mindshare of Datadog is 2.3%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog2.3%
Cisco Crosswork Network Insights0.2%
Other97.5%
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.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
39%
Outsourcing Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise49
Large Enterprise100
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Crosswork Network Insights?
The purchasing of Cisco Crosswork Network Insights is managed by generating the PR and then the procurement team takes care of the pricing and purchasing, which are directly from Cisco or another m...
What needs improvement with Cisco Crosswork Network Insights?
In future updates of Cisco Crosswork Network Insights, I would like to see more integrated AI with such tools.
What is your primary use case for Cisco Crosswork Network Insights?
Currently, our infrastructure has very limited use of Cisco Crosswork Network Insights, so we haven't explored much of those technologies, and I'm not getting anything to improve from that perspect...
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: August 2026.
910,005 professionals have used our research since 2012.