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Cisco UCS Manager vs Datadog vs SolarWinds NPM 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
5.1
Cisco UCS Manager enhances ROI by minimizing hardware failures, downtime, and maintenance, simplifying management, and integrating efficiently with other tools.
Sentiment score
7.1
Organizations experienced diverse returns with Datadog, reporting time savings, reduced blindspots, enhanced visibility, integration benefits, and efficiency improvements.
Sentiment score
7.2
SolarWinds NPM enhances infrastructure visibility, delivering cost reductions, faster issue resolution, and significant ROI through optimized resource management.
I can manage all LAN uplinks and fiber channel storage uplinks directly from UCS Manager.
Cisco UCS Manager provides cost savings by reducing the time support staff spend on long deployments.
The return on investment is significant as the solution effectively reduces costs while being worth its expense.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.2
Cisco UCS Manager support is praised for expertise and responsiveness, though European support and urgent issues may vary.
Sentiment score
7.3
Datadog customer service is responsive and professional, offering proactive support despite occasional delays in their ticket system.
Sentiment score
6.9
SolarWinds NPM support gets mixed reviews, praised for expertise yet noted for delays and aggressive sales tactics.
With Intersight, service requests are automatically generated, enhancing the user experience and providing timely resolutions.
For a severity one case, a call ensures immediate assistance and resolution of the matter.
Regarding Cisco tech, they are pretty good.
If there is no timely response, getting a resolution is more difficult.
We had contact with SolarWinds regarding the implementation, and they were helpful.
They have good technical support.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Cisco UCS Manager offers scalable infrastructure solutions, though constrained by chassis limits, with largely positive user feedback.
Sentiment score
7.6
Datadog scales efficiently with diverse technologies, though rising costs and limited API capabilities remain concerns for some users.
Sentiment score
6.9
SolarWinds NPM is scalable, adapts well to infrastructures, but may face performance and cost issues on virtual platforms.
I can install the hypervisor, such as VMware, and add the servers into the cluster seamlessly.
I would rate the scalability at nine out of ten, probably.
SolarWinds NPM is scalable and effective in handling large network infrastructures.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Cisco UCS Manager is praised for its stability, reliability, and prompt support, often outperforming competitors in overall robustness.
Sentiment score
8.0
Datadog offers reliable performance with minimal downtime, resolving integration issues promptly and maintaining consistent uptime even during peak traffic.
Sentiment score
7.5
SolarWinds NPM is stable with issues from server limits and bugs, resolved through updates and proper configuration.
If there's a really complex problem, I would probably give it a ten since it gets escalated quickly.
The NPM product is stable, particularly when used for simple network monitoring.
 

Room For Improvement

Cisco UCS Manager needs a streamlined interface, enhanced support, simpler updates, better integration, affordability, and improved monitoring.
Datadog struggles with performance, usability, and cost issues, requiring improvements in integration, documentation, and user interface.
SolarWinds NPM users report issues with network discovery, UI features, costs, automation, support, and security improvements are needed.
We would benefit from advancements in AI that offer firmware recommendations automatically, reducing the need for human intervention and vendor communication.
It doesn't work straight out of the UCS, so someone who knows what they're doing is needed immediately, and it can be quite confusing.
While it has been improved from using Java to HTML, simplifying the tabs would enhance user experience.
The documentation is adequate, but team members coming into a project could benefit from more guided, interactive tutorials, ideally leveraging real-world data.
There should be a clearer view of the expenses.
Customers have given feedback about the delayed response times from the technical team.
SolarWinds needs to upscale on observability and add full-fledged observability features, including security features.
Features such as taking backup of the devices or configurations of the devices can be included in further versions of SolarWinds NPM.
 

Setup Cost

Cisco UCS Manager is seen as expensive but offers competitive value with bundled discounts, quality, and reliability.
Datadog's pricing model is flexible yet can be costly, requiring careful planning to optimize its comprehensive features and avoid surprises.
SolarWinds NPM pricing varies by setup size, with initial costs, tiered licensing, and maintenance fees influencing total expenses.
Recently, we acquired an excellent bundle with significant discounts, with offers like buying three servers and getting one free, along with UCSC and fabric included for free.
As long as they can afford it, there is a setup cost involved.
The setup cost for Datadog is more than $100.
PRTG's package offers all features in one bundle, which is cost-effective.
The solution is considered expensive.
 

Valuable Features

Cisco UCS Manager offers unified management, easy deployment, flexible configurations, high availability, and cross-infrastructure security compatibility.
Datadog excels in integration, monitoring, and data visualization, enhancing system reliability and efficiency with seamless AWS synchronization.
SolarWinds NPM offers ease of deployment, real-time monitoring, customizable alerts, and user-friendly design for efficient network management.
It supports ease of deployment, allowing for quick mass deployments in the data center, saving time and resources by doing so from a remote location.
Whenever there's a failure of any component, it's very easy to swap because you just disassociate that profile, remove the faulty blade, connect the new blade, and associate that profile, maintaining the same MAC address and worldwide port name.
One of the valuable features is the user interface base, specifically the C user interface.
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.
The technology itself is generally very useful.
It provides a detailed overview of the network, which is valuable.
SolarWinds NPM has specific modules for monitoring different network capabilities, which provides rich features for carrying out specific tasks.
The most valuable feature for us is the database performance analyzer, which we use a lot.
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS Manager is 1.4%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 5.5%, down from 6.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 3.8%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Edwin Mwosa - PeerSpot reviewer
Enhanced network oversight with rapid issue identification and good efficiency
We mainly use Cisco UCS Manager to integrate and manage our Cisco switches across the building. We also utilize it for network integration. It provides an integrated solution for our Cisco environment, streamlining our operations and managing multiple Cisco devices like switches and routers Cisco…
Kevin Palmer - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful log aggregation and management with helpful metrics aggregation
Datadog provides us value in three major ways: First, Datadog provides best-in-class functionality in many, if not all, of the products to which we subscribe (infrastructure, APM, log management, serverless, synthetics, real user monitoring, DB monitoring). In my experience with other tools that provide similar functionality, Datadog provides the largest feature set with the most flexibility and the best performance. Second, Datadog allows us to access all of those services in one place. Having to learn and manage only one tool for all of those purposes is a major benefit. Third, Datadog provides significant connectivity between those services so that we can view, summarize, organize, translate and correlate our data with maximum effect. Not needing to manually integrate them to draw lines between those pieces of information is a huge time savings for us.
Masud Alam - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers alerting service to trigger alerts and easy to manage
For end-user performance monitoring, we like features such as availability of our all devices and device/interface monitoring. We have also used NCM (Network Configuration Manager) for our network. We use the alerting service to trigger alerts based on specific thresholds, like CPU or memory utilization exceeding a certain percentage. There are AI network initiatives in SolarWinds NPM for some lengthy issues. For example, it shows availability reports. But for bandwidth monitoring, it's not very clear how much bandwidth is being consumed. SolarWinds provide real-time bandwidth monitoring. It is not difficult to manage the network with SolarWinds. We have one customer with a satellite location. If we have a large network with, let's say, 43,000 elements, and our current SolarWinds license supports only 30,000, we would need to create another polling engine to accommodate the additional 13,000 elements. It's limited to the polling engine, so we can only support 30,000 elements per engine. So it's only for 30,000, but we have at least 40,000 elements in our network.
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 31, 2015
Nagios vs. Zabbix vs. PRTG vs. Spiceworks vs. Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor
I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Educational Organization
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
16%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco UCS Manager?
When one server fails, we can attach the service profile to a new server, which saves a lot of time.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco UCS Manager?
My experience with the pricing of Cisco UCS Manager ( /products/cisco-ucs-manager-reviews ) is that it is reasonable....
What needs improvement with Cisco UCS Manager?
For improvements, while the current graphical user interface is satisfactory, it could be further simplified for diff...
Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems,...
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 time...
Which would you choose - Datadog or Dynatrace?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was t...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
It actually depends on the exact purpose or kind of devices (network devices, servers, something else). Some tools ar...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
We are partners with SolarWinds and we sell a lot of Network management to large enterprises also because of scalabil...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
No data available
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Management Science Associates, Peak 10, Virtual Consulting Professionals
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
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Datadog, Auvik and others in IT Infrastructure Monitoring. Updated: June 2025.
862,077 professionals have used our research since 2012.