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Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM) vs Datadog comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 13, 2025

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 Nexus Dashboard Fabri...
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
17th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Datadog
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
188
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (3rd), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM) is 0.6%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 3.1%, down from 3.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Datadog3.1%
Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM)0.6%
Other96.3%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Upul Abhayasena - PeerSpot reviewer
Robust management tool with an easy setup and room for more features
DCNM is used by one of the airline customers in Qatar to manage many data centers and rack switches running on normal Nexus or NX-OS mode. They required a controller platform to manage these Nexus switches, and thus, they utilized DCNM as a Fabric controller. Given that ACI deployment is very low…
reviewer820579 - PeerSpot reviewer
Single pane of glass, easy to share dashboards, and good for monitoring
We've had some issues where we had Datadog automatically turned on in AWS regions that we weren't using, which incurred a small but steady cost that amounted to tens of thousands of dollars spent over a few weeks. I wish there was a global setting that lets an admin restrict which regions DD is turned on in as a default setup step. Sometimes, the APM service dashboard link isn't sharable. I click something in the service catalog, and on that service's APM default view, I try to share a link to that with a teammate, and they reach a blank or error screen. I wish there was more organization and detail in the suggestions when I use the query editor. I'm never quite sure when the autofill dropdown shows up if I'm seeing some custom tag or some default property, so I have to know exactly what I'm looking for in order to build a chart. It's hard to navigate and explore using the query autofill suggestions without knowing exactly what tag to look for. It's been a bit hard to understand how data gets sampled or how many data points a particular dashboard value is using. We've had questions over the RUM metrics that we see and we had to ask for help with how values are calculated, bin sizes, etc to get confidence in our data.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Stability is not an issue."
"The most valuable features of Cisco Data Center Network Manager are consistency and the core server. The teams have had a good experience."
"The most valuable feature is the connectivity monitoring."
"It uses push technology, which pushes the changes to all relevant devices to ensure they are updated accordingly."
"I like that is easy to work on and straightforward."
"The product has excellent stability."
"The automation capability is more than enough. It depends on how we consider and integrate the automation engine. We need to ensure the automation engine and then how to perform it. It depends on the policy making, API integration, and other integrations."
"Monitoring system provides a clear indication of what's going on in the network."
"We have a better grasp of what is occurring during the deployment cycle. If something fails, we have an idea what has failed, where it has failed, and how it failed to better mitigate the situation."
"We've been able to glean from the monitors what servers are down, and can alert the team in Slack."
"Datadog has proven to be easy to set up and legible for both development and operational teams."
"I find the greatest feature is being able to search across logs from various microservices."
"Log analytics give us a powerful mechanism for error tracking, research, and analysis."
"The feature I have found most valuable is when I can reuse existing monitors and alerts for new dashboards."
"The dashboards are super convenient to us for a more zoomed out view of what is going on with each integration that we utilize."
"Several critical dashboards were created years ago and are still in use today."
 

Cons

"One of the biggest challenges is that we aren't always able to push the configuration onto the target device. Whenever this happens, we have to do a factory reset, put on the script, and then reconfigure it again. In the next release, I would like to have a troubleshooting feature."
"The automation feature could be improved."
"We need better performance and reliability."
"It's very costly."
"More integration features would be beneficial."
"The tool's pricing strategy could be improved to compete more effectively in the market, especially against competitors like Huawei, Aruba, and Juniper."
"The configuration is too complicated and you have to create templates and use a lot of menus."
"If the customer thinks about using additional solutions, Cisco should make sure they are not left out."
"I love to have some DD guru come in and do a department training directly at our setup."
"The pricing nowadays is quite complex."
"It would be great if usage metrics were automatically created and we could create custom metrics, instead we ended up building some of our own stuff to track and alert on our own usage."
"I like the idea of monitoring on the go, however, it seems the options are still a bit limited out of the box."
"One area where the product could be improved is Application Performance Monitoring (APM)."
"I'd like to see an expansion of the Android and IOS apps to have a simplified CI/CD pipeline history view."
"There is always room for improvement when dealing with cloud-based technologies. Mainly, I would say, it's just increasing our offerings to attract various other types of industries and businesses across more fields."
"I found the solution to be stable, I did not experience any bugs or glitches. However, some of the managing team did."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is very expensive."
"On average, Data Center Network Manager's pricing isn't too costly unless you choose a premier license."
"We usually opt for a yearly plan, commonly for three or five years upfront. Some customers may not utilize all the features included in the product, and this can lead to them paying for functionalities they don't need."
"When we purchase a Nexus box, the MDS CM license comes with it."
"The price of Cisco Data Center Network Manager is expensive compared to other vendors on the market."
"I would say that the pricing offers great value for the money."
"The product is licensed with contracts that work on a yearly basis rather than a monthly model."
"The tool is always expensive, but their service, product quality, and support are good. We're happy with it, but it's still an expensive solution. There are cheaper alternatives but no similar platform across all domains."
"​Pricing seems reasonable. It depends on the size of your organization, the size of your infrastructure, and what portion of your overall business costs go toward infrastructure."
"This solution is budget friendly."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"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."
"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."
"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 costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business78
Midsize Enterprise42
Large Enterprise82
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco Data Center Network Manager?
It uses push technology, which pushes the changes to all relevant devices to ensure they are updated accordingly.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Data Center Network Manager?
The tool is always expensive, but their service, product quality, and support are good. We're happy with it, but it's still an expensive solution. There are cheaper alternatives but no similar plat...
What needs improvement with Cisco Data Center Network Manager?
In a mixed architecture where Nexus switches are used as border devices and are connected to a Palo Alto firewall (e.g., version 9.1 or 10.1), you might encounter issues with BGP peering. For insta...
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 ...
 

Also Known As

Cisco Data Center Network Manager
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Banco de Guayaquil, Cox Communications, Kuwait Petroleum Italia, Roper St. Francis, University of British Columbia
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 Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (Formerly DCNM) vs. Datadog and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,771 professionals have used our research since 2012.