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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
3rd
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 (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
Icinga
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
28th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
31st
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
25th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Datadog is 2.5%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Icinga is 1.4%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog2.5%
Icinga1.4%
Other96.1%
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

"Our ROI with Datadog has been very high."
"Datadog has impacted our organization positively since we were previously using AppDynamics and then we switched to Datadog, which improved a lot in our alerting and monitoring in the infrastructure space and application space, allowing us to monitor business transactions and take proactive action before an end user reports it."
"Datadog has made it much easier to have a central place for people to look for logs and made it much easier to notify them of any elevated error rates or failures."
"The initial setup was straightforward from my own experience, helping integrate within the application and service levels."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"The agents feature in Datadog stands out as a valuable asset within our organization due to its robust functionality, versatility, and role in providing comprehensive monitoring and observability capabilities."
"The most valuable feature of Datadog is its logs, as we can use the logs to conduct analysis and root cause analysis."
"From the number of outages stopped or shortened (which lead to lost revenue from non-renewals) and the number of hours saved on investigations (which correlates to engineering salaries), I estimate that the ROI of the implementation time and monthly charges to be between 10x and 20x."
"This solution has a self-healing handler where if the service is down, it is automatically restarted."
"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."
"The value of Icinga is that it has hundreds of plugins, so it's really easy to monitor pretty much anything."
"Icinga has multiple automation and integration features. There is an API for everything and a web UI for configurations. The APIs enable you to automate tasks in Icinga. We can also use plugins to talk to the API. The Icinga Director talks to a database in the background, and you can import settings from the CMDB to all systems in Icinga."
"I would recommend Icinga; it's an open-source solution, it's quite easy and simple to use, and checks can be run with Python code and Shell Script code."
"Icinga2 was designed to delegate, distribute and balance tasks between several nodes."
"It is really easy in Icinga to create your own plugin and integrate it without any fuss. And it works just perfectly fine."
"I use it for monitoring infrastructure and it was very good for that issue."
 

Cons

"The error traceability is an area that can be improved."
"I'd like to see more flexibility in the customization and they have a few settings which need to be changed but we are unable to make those changes as users or as the administrator."
"While I like the ease of use, when compared with Tenable Nessus they could still improve their usability."
"Datadog isn't as mature as some of the established players like Dynatrace or Splunk. It's a new product, so they are constantly releasing new features, and I don't have much to complain about."
"ECS could be improved by including more tutorials for beginners to reduce the barriers to entry."
"ECS could be improved by including more tutorials for beginners to reduce the barriers to entry."
"We need a lot of modules since we collect all data logs from all operating systems."
"The only issue I face is when more than one person editing these dashboards simultaneously, one or the other person sometimes loses his/her work."
"Icinga’s automation could be improved."
"One thing that Icinga lacks is the capability to create advanced and customized dashboards within the tool itself."
"The installation and configuration are very complex."
"Scalability is problematic. If you have a stable environment it's good, but if the environment is growing, I had some problems with Icinga."
"One of the areas that are frustrating is remote monitoring for more than one machine."
"The tool currently fails to provide notifications to users."
"Sometimes, it is very hard to keep an overview of what's happening."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"The price is better than some competing products."
"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
"Pricing is somewhat affordable compared to other solutions but in order to really lower the costs of other products you need to plan very carefully your resources usage, otherwise, it can get expensive real quick."
"It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low."
"The solution is free to use."
"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."
"The product is inexpensive compared to other DBM products."
"We're using the free version of Icinga."
"It's an open-source solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
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 Enterprise46
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.
890,088 professionals have used our research since 2012.