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Datadog vs Dynatrace vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor 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:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Datadog is 5.2%, down from 9.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dynatrace is 6.0%, down from 11.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.3%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog5.2%
Dynatrace6.0%
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor1.3%
Other87.5%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Manish Indupuri - PeerSpot reviewer
senior DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
AI-driven insights have reduced downtime and improved cross-team collaboration
We encountered some challenges while using Dynatrace. Although the initial setup was smooth, fine-tuning alert thresholds and custom metrics took some time. Another challenge was that Dynatrace charges based on host units, so we had to carefully plan our agent deployments. The licensing model is expensive. Additionally, the complexity of setup is an issue. While OneAgent and auto-discover services are powerful, the setup is more complex compared to other tools such as Prometheus and Grafana. These integrations are simple and basic, but Dynatrace setup requires more complexity based on the environment. For new users wanting to use Dynatrace, it is difficult. However, the AI-related solutions and metrics took us to the next level for identifying and fixing things. Dynatrace requires an agent for operation. OneAgent is powerful, but it is also resource-heavy. On lightweight nodes or older systems, the agent can slightly impact performance. If Dynatrace could implement a lightweight agent behavior, we could make things faster. Additionally, if Dynatrace could add a long-term retention policy so that we could store more data and find fine-grained details, that would help us. While Dynatrace managed edition supports on-premises deployment, the SaaS version depends on cloud connectivity. For highly regulated or air-gapped environments, setup and updates can be challenging. Although the initial setup is smooth, if someone wants to fine-tune it and fully understand the tool end-to-end, it could be tricky.
NikhilKalwint - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Specialist at ServiceIO
Monitoring over a thousand systems has improved decision making and operational visibility
From an advantage perspective, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is comparatively cheaper from a commercial point of view. It is easy to install and configure, very user-friendly, and quick to get up and running, allowing you to see the early value adds in your organization. It is compatible with most technologies for monitoring with very few chances of incompatibility. Configuration also allows us to monitor all the technical parameters we are looking for, making it a very good experience for us. The alerting feature in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is a main advantage, as it alerts based on threshold breaches and can raise tickets to the ticketing system, send SMS, and email notifications, allowing engineers to work on those tickets to resolve issues and avoid further impact. The visibility into server health is a beneficial feature that I am utilizing. We widely use various application performance metrics in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor such as database monitoring and server monitoring, which are quite good enough for any monitoring solution. We utilize the customizable dashboards in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like that you can build out a dashboard pretty quickly. There are some things that come out of the box that you don't really need to do, which is great because they're default settings."
"Sometimes it's more user friendly for development teams, and there are parts of Datadog that are more understandable for development teams; for example, the APM in Datadog works more manually and works like the tools in New Relic, Grafana, or Elastic, making it easier to understand for software development teams."
"The Datadog suite has allowed us to easily integrate log collection into all of our services and quickly detect unexpected changes in system data to declare security incidents."
"The fact that everything is under a single pane of glass is really valuable, as developers don't have to spend their time copying correlation IDs across tools to find what they need."
"Watchdog is a favorite feature among a lot of the devs. It catches things they didn't even know were an issue."
"I like Datadog because it is so easy use, I can easily connect to public clouds, and I have a view of observability."
"Flame graphs are pretty useful for understanding how GraphQL resolves our federated queries when it comes to identifying slow points in our requests. In our microservice environment with 170 services."
"This solution has improved our organization by giving us deeper insight into what's running in our clusters and their performance of it."
"It saves your reputation once you have a product out there in the market and what you are doing to keep it up and running."
"One of them is to use PurePath to pick out frustrated users, see where the issue is, and analyze why it is happening."
"The most valuable feature is, I can quickly go to the PurePath and find the problem in the application."
"Honestly, I've heard this asked of others, and for me, I'm thinking, "Can there be anything else?" I just haven't even thought about it because I feel that Dynatrace thinks of everything before I can even think of the need for anything else."
"It helps to improve code efficiency and has quicker performance analysis."
"The major improvement was the ability to find errors immediately and predict future failures, or when resources reach the maximum capacity."
"With PurePath, I am able to find the root cause of the error or bug existing in our system."
"It is limitless when it comes down to being able to scale up or even scale back, if we need it to."
"Manage Groups: The capability to group appropriate devices gives better visibility of sites, categories, or critical regions. The same can be used to represent a dashboard for higher management."
"Monitoring of processes and services is the most valuable feature; it is not necessarily just the server alone in terms of the CPU or the memory, as we can go in-depth into services and processes."
"The ROI for SolarWinds products is unmatched in the industry."
"AppInsight. Provides a simple way to get very in-depth monitoring configured for our most popular applications. Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint."
"The most beneficial aspect of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its ability to monitor at the application level."
"There are many valuable features, including the network configuration manager, and the network performance manager."
"I adore the NTA module that provides deep details on ingress/egress traffic for any interface. With a few clicks, you can correlate who is accessing what and when, beside the bandwidth consuming applications/users."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its interface, which is used for monitoring."
 

Cons

"The more tools that they can build that allow you to run AWX playbooks, or other similar fixes, would benefit clients greatly."
"The sheer amount of products that are included can be overwhelming."
"Their security features could be improved."
"It does not have the best interface."
"It is too early to say whether we are getting our money's worth, but we have felt the difference in terms of optimization and user experience."
"For three to four months, we have been experiencing real-time delays. For example, if we're monitoring incoming traffic, the real-time status should be displayed up to a certain point. However, due to delays or issues with Datadog, the real-time data might only be updated at an earlier time. We are experiencing consistent delays in data updates from Datadog, with the most recent data often being delayed by about an hour. This issue has been ongoing for the past four months."
"They could enhance the alerting functions by creating a new feature to add direct SMS notifications, on-call rotation scheduling, etc., that could replace the need to have this as an external third-party solution integration."
"I'd like to see an expansion of the Android and IOS apps to have a simplified CI/CD pipeline history view."
"The web-based UI needs to be improved. The client seems to be heavy on laptops and desktops."
"I would like to see dashboards included, and maybe more possibilities in terms of customization."
"The Web UI can be slow and hard to understand."
"​Experience with relationship/account manager has been really poor, it does not seem to be the firm's priority to support their customers."
"Our main problems have been that it has a high learning curve to it. I've used it for about three years now and I'm still learning it."
"Make the Web UI more robust. Last time I used the web interface, it was still pretty crude."
"Pricing is still too expensive."
"C language integration requires manual implementation through the SDK, which is rather difficult and time consuming."
"Reporting is the only thing with which we currently have challenges. They have this in two ways. There is the report writer, which is the backend, and we also have web reports, which are on the console. So, they have removed the report writer for the backend reports, and we are making use of the web console, but most of the users are not finding it very interesting to use the frontend reports. I would like them to bring back the report writer. That's the key area within it to improve on the reporting. If they can bring back the report writer, then most users will actually be comfortable. I have some customers who are trying to export their report to an Excel format, but it is not possible because they said any report that has been done from the web console cannot be exported to Excel, but most of the customers need to export their reports to Excel. That's one area they need to work on."
"I had some stability issues. I lost my environment, but with the help of SolarWinds support, I was able to get back to a stable platform."
"It would be helpful if the solution could integrate more with the security compliances, like this IDSS, etc."
"The technical support is nothing special."
"Mapping interactions between systems."
"PerfStack can be made more effective."
"I believe that some of the trends, environmental maps, and items like those found in Orion would be very beneficial."
"The tool’s report feature created issues for us. We needed to gain skills to use that feature. The tool’s customization is not easy since you have to reconfigure the whole system."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It has a module-based pricing model."
"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"​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."
"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."
"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."
"Pricing and licensing are reasonable for what they give you. You get the first five hosts free, which is fun to play around with. Then it's about four dollars a month per host, which is very affordable for what you get out of it. We have a lot of hosts that we put a lot of custom metrics into, and every host gives you an allowance for the number of custom metrics."
"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."
"We are buying more licenses, because we are seeing more value."
"It's expensive."
"The product is definitely worth taking a look at. Be aware that it is probably more pricey than other options on the market, but there are a lot of capabilities. Dynatrace has an eye toward the future and the computing and monitoring needs that we are gonna need for the cloud. ​"
"The pricing is not bad, but it could be better."
"Dynatrace is very good and it's provided a lot of information, it plays a positive role in making your application up to date in the market. If you want to monitor some applications only, it would be cheaper if you did cloud monitoring, but the price benefit depends on the use case."
"Licensing is very interesting, as you pay only for what is being monitored. A lot of things are given away for no additional cost. If you have a great IT consolidation, it will be pretty cheap. If you have a lot of servers, it will be heavier."
"The pricing and licensing are very expensive."
"We license it for two environments, typically all of production and all of one lower environment, usually our staging environment. If there is a downside to Dynatrace, the only thing I can think of would be the cost. If it were cheaper, I'd have it in all my environments. I don't think they're charging more than it's worth, by any means. It's just that good software costs money."
"When compared to other licensed models in the market, it stands out as one of the more cost-effective options."
"SAM is not per server so the pricing model can be deceiving. If you have an enterprise environment, you will quickly exceed your licensing quickly. You should know this before going in."
"The licenses start from USD 3000.00 and go up to USD 20,000.00 for the year. It's a perpetual license. Nothing is free in SolarWinds, anything that you need is an additional cost."
"Understanding the counts of objects to monitor will determine the licensing need. In terms of pricing, it’s not cheap but it’s not expensive as larger vendors whose products don’t have all the features or integrations."
"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."
"I have always said SolarWinds is very “proud” of their products, meaning they are expensive. I cannot afford to purchase all the licenses I need for all the SolarWinds products."
"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
"I think SolarWinds' pricing is very decent compared to other competitors in the market."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
12%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business81
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise99
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business78
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise299
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
 

Questions from the Community

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...
Any advice about APM solutions?
The key is to have a holistic view over the complete infrastructure, the ones you have listed are great for APM if yo...
What cloud monitoring software did you choose and why?
While the environment does matter in the selection of an APM tool, I prefer to use Dynatrace to manage the entire sta...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dynatrace?
For pricing, we use the Classic model, specifically DPS, which stands for platform subscription. The cost can be cont...
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There is definitely room for improvement besides simplifying its setup. As a non-technical person, I believe the dash...
 

Also Known As

No data available
No data available
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
Audi, Best Buy, LinkedIn, CISCO, Intuit, KRONOS, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, ULTA Beauty, Lenovo, Swarovsk, Nike, Whirlpool, American Express
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: March 2026.
885,728 professionals have used our research since 2012.