Datadog vs Icinga comparison

Datadog and Icinga are both solutions in the Network Monitoring Software category. Datadog is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.7, while Icinga is ranked #19 with an average rating of 8.0. Datadog holds a 3.1% mindshare in NMS, compared to Icinga’s 2.8% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of Datadog users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 85% of Icinga users who would recommend it.

Datadog

Read 203 Datadog reviews

23,433 Views
4,452 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Icinga

Read 17 Icinga reviews

3,873 Views
3,370 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

Datadog

Icinga

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 13, 2025

Datadog and Icinga are leading contenders in the monitoring and observability software category. Datadog appears to have an edge due to its extensive feature set and seamless integration capabilities.

Features: Datadog offers extensive integrations with dashboards, application performance monitoring, and root cause analysis. It provides an easy way to manage monitors and visualize complex data systems. Icinga stands out with its strong monitoring framework and automation capabilities, benefiting from open-source plugins and add-ons to enhance its utility.

Room for Improvement: Datadog users seek enhanced real-time data insights and improved integration options, with concerns about pricing as data usage increases. Its interface could benefit from better customizability. Icinga users want more advanced dashboard customization and easier deployment, as its extensive customization can complicate setup.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Datadog supports versatile cloud deployment models, providing flexibility for enterprises, though its customer service could improve in response times. Icinga typically deploys on-premises, suitable for organizations focused on data control, though its technical support response is occasionally challenging.

Pricing and ROI: Datadog uses a subscription model that can become costly with extensive usage, while Icinga offers a cost-effective open-source solution with optional paid support. Datadog provides a strong return through enhanced visibility, whereas Icinga offers value in low financial overhead and flexible integration.

To learn more, read our detailed Datadog vs. Icinga Report (Updated: October 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Datadog vs. Icinga

October 2025

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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

Datadog

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

4th

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

3rd

Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software

2nd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

203

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th)

Icinga

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

19th

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

27th

Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software

20th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Server Monitoring (11th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Datadog is 3.1%, down from 3.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Icinga is 2.8%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Datadog	3.1%
Icinga	2.8%
Other	94.1%

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Prakash Pandey

IT Manager at Liberty Mutual Insurance

Has improved monitoring accuracy and enabled faster issue resolution through detailed alerting and transaction visibility

The best feature that Datadog offers is infrastructure monitoring, where it can look at the CPU utilization, different process utilization, all the processes which are running, and alert us in advance if things are going beyond normal threshold. I think everything about the features of Datadog is amazing. Datadog provides details up to the transactions. We can look at the transaction log too for the application, which is really helpful. Datadog has impacted our organization positively since we were previously using AppDynamics and then we switched to Datadog. It has improved a lot in our alerting and monitoring in the infrastructure space and application space. We can monitor business transactions and take proactive action. It is really great to take actions on the issues before an end user reports it, which is a great advantage for us.

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Harrison Bulley

Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Net Consulting

A stable, scalable and cost-effective solution that helps with inbuilt scripts for easy modification

I think the software is quite good, but we have had problems with getting it to recognize certain areas and amend certain checks, where we needed so we would have to create backend scripts for those checks. Though, being open source, it has the support to create backend scripts, it would be better to have these scripts in-built.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Log analytics give us a powerful mechanism for error tracking, research, and analysis."

"Thanks to the logs, we manage to make better reports through Jira and also to trace the request with more facility than we would be able to do otherwise."

"We can handle debugging and find out why things are breaking in our applications."

"The monitoring functionality, in general, and tagging infrastructure are great."

"The technology itself is generally very useful and the interface is great."

"Watchdog is a favorite feature among a lot of the devs. It catches things they didn't even know were an issue."

"Datadog's learning platform is second to none."

"Datadog dashboards are pretty great."

More Datadog pros

"The best thing about the solution is how it highlights errors, the issues, and what needs my attention. The solution directs me to areas that I should look for first."

"The drafts are easy but what I like about Icinga is that there are many add-ons that you can download."

"The ability to customize scripts and build your own queries to request information from the infrastructure elements you want to monitor. This level of personalization and customization is highly appreciated."

"It is really easy in Icinga to create your own plugin and integrate it without any fuss. And it works just perfectly fine."

"We have found the solution to be stable."

"I like the ability to amend and adjust things really easily, which is useful in a case where you could make it auto-discover and then set a template to say all of these applications or servers under this template have an automatic threshold set that you’d set up manually."

"This solution has a self-healing handler where if the service is down, it is automatically restarted."

"Macros and the ability to connect it to Google Maps are valuable features."

More Icinga pros

Cons

"It can have a more modernized pricing mechanism. We're actually working with them to figure out how to become more modular and have a better and more modernized pricing mechanism. The issue with Datadog is that you have to buy the whole suite of different products, and you kind of get stuck in the old utilization of 40% of their suite. Most organizations today break down between application development, networking, and security. Therefore, there should be a way to break down different modules into just app dev, infosec, networking, etc. Customers have various needs across their business lines, and sometimes, they're just not willing to have tools that they're not using 100%. AppDynamics is probably a little bit better in terms of being modular."

"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is really expensive."

"Additional metrics should be included."

"I would like the tooling to have better integration in Slack, specifically sending out reminders to the relevant people to take breaks, do a retrospective, and specify with emojis which messages to log."

"I've only been using Datadog for a few months, and at first, it was frankly overwhelming in terms of both the UI and the available capabilities."

"They need to implement template variables into the message response body."

"Datadog could improve the flexibility with AI and ML concepts. This will allow customers to be more leveraged towards publishing."

"We have found that some of the different options for filtering for logs ingestion, APM traces and span ingestion, and RUM sessions vs replay settings can be hard to discover and tough to determine how to adjust and tweak for both optimal performance and monitoring as well as for billing within the console."

More Datadog cons

"The solution lacks many features important to higher-level IT management and network support."

"One of the areas that are frustrating is remote monitoring for more than one machine."

"At this time, the layout of the website is a bit difficult. It should be more user-friendly for changing the background and logos."

"The user interface should be improved."

"It needs Trap SNMP. I saw the documentation for Zabbix, that it has its own built-in product which handles SNMP traps, and there's nothing similar in Icinga or Nagios. I think this feature is most important for me."

"Icinga is a complex solution that's hard to learn. It's a powerful product for monitoring, but new users will have a hard time figuring out what to do."

"We have found some problems with Nagios, and support isn't very responsive."

"Icinga’s automation could be improved."

More Icinga cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"This solution is budget friendly."

"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."

"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."

"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."

"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."

"The pricing came up a bit compared to their competitors. It is not that the price has risen, but that the competitors have gone down. They keep adding more features that I would have expected to be baked in at a more nominal price. I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the pricing, but not enough to jump ship."

"It is easy to run up a large bill, so become familiar with the cost of each piece of your bill and use the metrics they supply to estimate and monitor your bill."

More Datadog pricing and cost advice

"This is an open-source solution with paid support."

"Even though Icinga's financial cost is low, it is an expensive product regarding the resources required to maintain and operate it."

"The solution is cheap."

"It's an open-source solution."

"We're using the free version of Icinga."

"The solution is free to use."

"It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low."

"The product is inexpensive compared to other DBM products."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Comms Service Provider

13%

Computer Software Company

10%

Educational Organization

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	80
Midsize Enterprise	46
Large Enterprise	93

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	7

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, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Icinga?

The best thing about the solution is how it highlights errors, the issues, and what needs my attention. The solution directs me to areas that I should look for first.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Icinga?

It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low. If you want to include this product in the services you offer to your customers, the return on i...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Icinga?

There is room for improvement in multi-tenancy. It's not perfect, not even really good. It's average, but it should be improved. For instance, multi-tenancy for monitoring the virtual infrastructur...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dynatrace vs Datadog

Compared 11% of the time

Azure Monitor vs Datadog

Compared 7% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Datadog

Compared 4% of the time

New Relic vs Datadog

Compared 4% of the time

AWS X-Ray vs Datadog

Compared 4% of the time

More Datadog Competitors

Zabbix vs Icinga

Compared 38% of the time

Nagios Core vs Icinga

Compared 18% of the time

Checkmk vs Icinga

Compared 11% of the time

Nagios XI vs Icinga

Compared 5% of the time

LibreNMS vs Icinga

Compared 3% of the time

More Icinga Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Datadog

October 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Icinga

October 2025

Download Icinga product report

Also Known As

No data available

Icinga Cloud Monitoring

Overview

Datadog integrates extensive monitoring solutions with features like customizable dashboards and real-time alerting, supporting efficient system management. Its seamless integration capabilities with tools like AWS and Slack make it a critical part of cloud infrastructure monitoring.

Datadog offers centralized logging and monitoring, making troubleshooting fast and efficient. It facilitates performance tracking in cloud environments such as AWS and Azure, utilizing tools like EC2 and APM for service management. Custom metrics and alerts improve the ability to respond to issues swiftly, while real-time tools enhance system responsiveness. However, users express the need for improved query performance, a more intuitive UI, and increased integration capabilities. Concerns about the pricing model's complexity have led to calls for greater transparency and control, and additional advanced customization options are sought. Datadog's implementation requires attention to these aspects, with enhanced documentation and onboarding recommended to reduce the learning curve.

What are Datadog's Key Features?

Sharable Dashboards: Facilitate collaboration with customizable, intuitive dashboards.
Extensive Integrations: Seamlessly connects with tools like Slack and AWS to support workflows.
APM and RUM: Provides deep insights into application performance and user interactions.
Real-Time Tools: Enables agile responses to system issues with real-time monitoring.
Unified Tagging and Visualization: Eases management of complex systems with simplified visualization.

What Benefits and ROI Should Users Look For?

Efficient Troubleshooting: Centralized logging speeds up the identification and resolution of issues.
Streamlined Workflows: Integrations with popular tools enhance operational efficiency.
Improved Observability: Comprehensive monitoring improves system reliability and performance.
Resource Optimization: Efficient microservices and container management leads to better cloud resource utilization.
Responsive Alerts: Customizable alerts ensure timely identification of critical issues.

In industries like finance and technology, Datadog is implemented for its monitoring capabilities across cloud architectures. Its ability to aggregate logs and provide a unified view enhances reliability in environments demanding high performance. By leveraging real-time insights and integration with platforms like AWS and Azure, organizations in these sectors efficiently manage their cloud infrastructures, ensuring optimal performance and proactive issue resolution.

Datadog

Icinga is a robust tool for monitoring IT infrastructure, known for its distributed monitoring capabilities and seamless integration with multiple platforms. It efficiently observes servers, network devices, and environments like Linux and Windows, enabling proactive issue identification and resource management.

With a focus on task delegation and clustering, Icinga offers an intuitive interface through its GUI and Icinga Director, simplifying configuration. The extensive plugin library supports diverse technologies, while the API allows automation with tools like Terraform and Ansible. Despite its strengths, users report challenges with data display in the GUI, a need for improved dashboards, and complex configuration processes. Users benefit from its SNMP alerts, email notifications, and automated incident handling, making it essential for managed service environments and enterprises.

What are the key features of Icinga?

Task Delegation: Streamlines monitoring tasks across distributed systems.
Event Handler: Enables automatic service recovery with minimal intervention.
Plugin Library: Offers extensive support for integrating diverse technologies.
API Accessibility: Facilitates automation with popular tools like Terraform.
Custom Plugins: Allows easy creation and personalization for monitoring needs.

What benefits should you consider in Icinga reviews?

Flexibility: Tailors monitoring to specific requirements with community support.
Scalability: Successfully manages growing infrastructure demands.
Proactivity: Enhances issue identification and resource allocation.
Integration: Seamlessly works with existing IT operations platforms.

Icinga is widely adopted in IT environments for monitoring servers, networks, and applications across industries such as finance, healthcare, and technology. Its ability to integrate with various operating systems and automation platforms makes it a versatile choice for industries prioritizing comprehensive surveillance and proactive management of their infrastructure.

Icinga

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

Puppet Labs, Audi, Spacex, Debian, Snapdeal, McGill, RIPE Network Coordination Centre

Buyer's Guide

Datadog vs. Icinga

October 2025

Free Report: Datadog vs. Icinga

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