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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
210
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

"Datadog is a complete solution with easy-to-use templates and excellent scalability."
"We have been able to be a more confident, knowledgeable, and capable team when everything is being ported into a centralized format."
"Datadog has given us near-live visibility across our entire cloud platform."
"The solution's SaaS model is easy to manage and works well in single- or multi-cloud environments."
"Datadog is easy to use and easy to deploy. It's a better solution compared to others on the market in terms of being budget friendly for our customers."
"The solution is good for complex integations which have lots of downstream and involve multiple combined systems."
"The most valuable feature of Datadog is its logs, as we can use the logs to conduct analysis and root cause analysis."
"We have hundreds of microservices, and knowing how top-level requests weave throughout all of them is invaluable."
"The drafts are easy but what I like about Icinga is that there are many add-ons that you can download."
"We monitor all, starting from UPS to international mail chains."
"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."
"I use it for monitoring infrastructure and it was very good for that issue."
"It is really easy in Icinga to create your own plugin and integrate it without any fuss. And it works just perfectly fine."
"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."
"The value of Icinga is that it has hundreds of plugins, so it's really easy to monitor pretty much anything."
"An affordable solution for small organizations to do basic network monitoring."
 

Cons

"Alerting timing should be improved to be more fine-tuned and exact."
"It is hard to educate an entire team. There is a big learning curve."
"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."
"Once agents are connected to the Datadog portal, we should be able to upgrade them quickly."
"When it comes to storing the logs with Datadog, I'm not sure why it costs so much to store gigabytes or terabytes of information when it's a fraction of the cost to do so myself."
"ECS could be improved by including more tutorials for beginners to reduce the barriers to entry."
"Lacks some flexibility in the customization."
"They could have better log reporting."
"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."
"Network Discovery capabilities would be extremely helpful."
"The installation and configuration are very complex."
"Icinga’s automation could be improved."
"The user interface should be improved."
"One of the areas that are frustrating is remote monitoring for more than one machine."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Sometimes it's very hard to project how much it will cost for the monthly subscription for the next month when you add certain features. Having better visibility of the cost would give a better experience."
"The tool is open-source."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"The solution is fairly priced but history and log storage can get costly depending on your needs."
"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."
"At my last company, we did see ROI, specifically around response time. We could get to mission critical things that were down and losing revenue on immediately. So, the product paid itself back."
"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."
"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"The solution is cheap."
"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."
"This is an open-source solution with paid support."
"It's an open-source solution."
"Even though Icinga's financial cost is low, it is an expensive product regarding the resources required to maintain and operate it."
"We're using the free version of Icinga."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Educational Organization
14%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise47
Large Enterprise100
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise8
 

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.
893,438 professionals have used our research since 2012.