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Datadog vs Icinga comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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
2nd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
208
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (3rd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
Icinga
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
27th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
31st
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
26th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Datadog is 2.4%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Icinga is 1.3%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog2.4%
Icinga1.3%
Other96.3%
Network Monitoring Software
 

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.
Harrison Bulley - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Having a clear view, not only of our infrastructure but our apps and services as well, has brought a great added value to our customers."
"Both the engineering team and the product team are seeing tremendous value from this solution."
"Datadog allows for much better visibility across our entire fleet and has saved us countless eng hours as a result."
"Datadog has impacted our organization positively because the general feeling is that it's superior to the ELK stack that we used to use, being significantly faster in searching and filtering the information down, as well as providing links to our search criteria that our development teams and cloud operations teams can use to look at the same problems without having to set up their own search and filter criteria."
"The service catalog helped improve our organization by giving a good view of the flow for our microservices applications."
"The intuitive user interface has been one of the most valuable features for us."
"It has a high-level insight into the infrastructure model of the application and provides important detailed data on the host and metrics, which is the main concern of our customers."
"The visibility into our network has allowed for quick diagnosis of failures, identification of underutilized or over-utilized resources, and allowed for cloud cost optimization opportunities."
"The apply rules feature saves a lot of time."
"If you have a small infrastructure or a small number of devices that you want to monitor, then I think it's a good solution."
"This solution has a self-healing handler where if the service is down, it is automatically restarted."
"We have found the solution to be stable."
"An affordable solution for small organizations to do basic network monitoring."
"The value of Icinga is that it has hundreds of plugins, so it's really easy to monitor pretty much anything."
"The value of Icinga is that it has hundreds of plugins, so it's really easy to monitor pretty much anything."
"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."
 

Cons

"More pre-configured "Monitor Alerts" would be helpful."
"As a new customer, the Datadog user interface is a bit daunting."
"To be very fair, I haven't had enough experience with Datadog to pick out improvements."
"We have contact with many customers that cover many areas, so we have cases where the infrastructure administration could be improved."
"We need more visibility into the error tracking dashboard."
"While I like the ease of use, when compared with Tenable Nessus they could still improve their usability."
"It is far too easy to run up huge unexpected costs."
"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is really expensive."
"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."
"At this time, the layout of the website is a bit difficult. It should be more user-friendly for changing the background and logos."
"One of the areas that are frustrating is remote monitoring for more than one machine."
"One thing that Icinga lacks is the capability to create advanced and customized dashboards within the tool itself."
"The solution lacks many features important to higher-level IT management and network support."
"At this time, the layout of the website is a bit difficult. It should be more user-friendly for changing the background and logos."
"It is not really adequate for our current needs. It causes additional issues which we have to work around and takes us time that a better solution would not."
"In general, the product does not look good. However, it does what it is supposed to do. So, the improvements should focus on usability and UI."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"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 didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"It has a module-based pricing model."
"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."
"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."
"We're using the free version of Icinga."
"It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low."
"Even though Icinga's financial cost is low, it is an expensive product regarding the resources required to maintain and operate it."
"It's an open-source solution."
"The product is inexpensive compared to other DBM products."
"The solution is cheap."
"This is an open-source solution with paid support."
"The solution is free to use."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Educational Organization
15%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business81
Midsize Enterprise47
Large Enterprise99
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise7
 

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...
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 ...
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...
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...
What is your primary use case for Icinga?
We use Icinga as a monitoring solution to monitor customers' infrastructures. We work as a managed service provider, so we offer monitoring and many other services to our customers. So we use it in...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Icinga Cloud Monitoring
 

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
Puppet Labs, Audi, Spacex, Debian, Snapdeal, McGill, RIPE Network Coordination Centre
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Icinga and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
892,487 professionals have used our research since 2012.