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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

"Datadog has improved our visibility into infrastructure topology and performance."
"We've been able to glean from the monitors what servers are down, and can alert the team in Slack."
"Metric graphing and Dashboards are the most valuable features because they give us good observability into our system and work well to alert us when interesting things happen."
"The most valuable feature is the dashboards that are provided out of the box, as well as ones we were able to configure."
"Our teams use Datadog more than they used their old observability tool—they're more production-aware, conscious of how their changes are impacting customers, how the changes they make to their application speed up or slow down their app, and the overall request flow."
"The setup cost was minimal."
"Our usage of Datadog has allowed us to improve our observability at great lengths."
"Having a wealth of information has helped us investigate outages, and having historical data helps us tune our system."
"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."
"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."
"I use it for monitoring infrastructure and it was very good for that issue."
"This solution has a self-healing handler where if the service is down, it is automatically restarted."
"It is really easy in Icinga to create your own plugin and integrate it without any fuss. And it works just perfectly fine."
"An affordable solution for small organizations to do basic network monitoring."
"There's a module called Icinga Director, which helps us configure the product using an intuitive interface through clicks instead of creating a text configuration. It's very helpful for us."
"Icinga2 was designed to delegate, distribute and balance tasks between several nodes."
 

Cons

"Some of the interface is still confusing to use."
"Since the Datadog platform has so many separate features, solving so many use cases, there are often inconsistencies in feature availability and interoperability between products."
"The more tools that they can build that allow you to run AWX playbooks, or other similar fixes, would benefit clients greatly."
"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."
"In terms of application monitoring, Datadog is not up to the level that New Relic is."
"The PagerDuty integration could be a little bit better."
"I found the solution to be stable, I did not experience any bugs or glitches. However, some of the managing team did."
"One area where I was really looking for improvement was the CSPM product line."
"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."
"The solution lacks many features important to higher-level IT management and network support."
"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."
"The connection between Icinga and Icinga Web."
"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."
"The user interface should be improved."
"The tool currently fails to provide notifications to users."
"At this time, the layout of the website is a bit difficult. It should be more user-friendly for changing the background and logos."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"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."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"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."
"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."
"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"Datadog does not provide any free plans to use the solution. When I start with a proof of concept it would be sensible to have a free plan to test the tool and check whether it fits the requirements of the project. Before the production stage, it is always good to have a free plan with some limited features, number of requests, or logs."
"Even though Icinga's financial cost is low, it is an expensive product regarding the resources required to maintain and operate it."
"This is an open-source solution with paid support."
"It's an open-source solution."
"The solution is free to use."
"The solution is cheap."
"We're using the free version of Icinga."
"The product is inexpensive compared to other DBM products."
"It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low."
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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
14%
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.
886,510 professionals have used our research since 2012.