No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Datadog vs SolarWinds AppOptics 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 Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
1st
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
Network Monitoring Software (4th), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (3rd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
SolarWinds AppOptics
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
55th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
61st
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
44th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Datadog is 4.7%, down from 9.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds AppOptics is 0.8%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog4.7%
SolarWinds AppOptics0.8%
Other94.5%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

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.
John Yuko - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Manager ICT - Projects at I&M Bank Ltd
Unique features allow consolidating and combing metrics into a single dashboard, but don't monitor mobile solutions
I would like to see more granular information provided on Unix applications. Also, the integration with Unix services should be a bit more straightforward in terms having an agent to retrieve your credentials rather than having to enter or save them for SSH on SolarWinds. From the outset, we had to set some commands to log into the search console, and they are saved on the solution, which presents a challenge in terms of exposure. The solution is unable to monitor APK solutions completely because we'd then be forced to break down the APK and provide the APIs or go through the source code. They don't have a module that can analyze an application that is maybe under-used.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Excellent autocomplete for everything in the UI."
"The technology itself is generally very useful and the interface is great."
"Since we integrated Datadog, we have had increased confidence in the quality of our service, and we had an easier time increasing our delivery velocity."
"The Datadog suite has allowed us to easily integrate log collection into all of our services and quickly detect unexpected changes in system data to declare security incidents."
"Additionally, integrations with, for example, GCP, Network, component, and Software providers are much easier as everything is now centralized."
"Datadog's ability to group and visualize the servers and the data makes it relatively easy for the root cause analysis."
"The observability pipelines are the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"We have way more observability than what we had before - on the application and the overall system."
"I have found the most valuable feature is application performance management."
"The sum solution, NTA, and DPA."
"Some of the most valuable features of SolarWinds are the topology discovery and network performance analysis."
"AppNeta provides a range of products, all based around intelligent network testing algorithms."
"Technical support is always live and they're supportive."
"The reporting of the solution is very good."
"Customer service is exceptional, as they are very much in tune with our service needs and are always in contact for both enhancement requests and overall satisfaction."
"SolarWinds AppOptics does far more than what an individual may realize; it is not just a SIEM tool."
 

Cons

"We need to learn more about the session reply feature inside of DD."
"The cost is pretty high."
"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."
"Ingesting data from various sources to monitor the log metrics of the system can always improve so that, if something goes wrong, the right teams are alerted."
"One thing we have run into is that it is so easy to add monitoring that we turn on things without really understanding the costs."
"It can have an artificial intelligence component. Even though I can seamlessly look at end-to-end security, it would be better to have alerts and notifications powered by an AI engine. I am not sure if they have an AI component. We have not reached out to them or looked at it, but this is something that I keep on talking about within our company in terms of features. Such a feature would be good to have, and it would further optimize my Security Ops team's abilities."
"Datadog is a platform that can be improved by making its pricing more predictable, as sometimes it is difficult to forecast exactly how much a new project will cost until after we have started ingesting the data."
"The ability to find what you are looking for when starting out could be improved."
"Does not perform traditional SNMP/CLI/NetFlow/WMI etc monitoring."
"The solution should be more user-friendly."
"AppOptics would benefit from having a much more centralized view."
"AppOptics would benefit from having a much more centralized view."
"I'd like to see the ability to use other internal instrumented applications as filters in the overview/aggregation screen."
"I would like to see more integration with other tools that are available on the market."
"In terms of the technology, I think they need to put some more advanced troubleshooting into SolarWinds, in terms of AI capabilities. That's the next generation, especially in the cases of APIs which have already adopted AI capabilities into their products."
"Because of its inability to monitor mobile solutions, I would rate this solution as a seven out of ten."
 

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."
"This solution is budget friendly."
"The solution is fairly priced but history and log storage can get costly depending on your needs."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"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."
"Mostly, it's a perpetual license. We don't have any customers using the subscription right now—it's mostly a perpetual license that the customers purchase. The licensing is based on the number of elements, whereas other solutions are node-based."
"I believe the current licensing cost is reasonable."
"Since it's a negotiable rate, I would rate the pricing as a five out of five."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Construction Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
7%
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 Business2
Midsize Enterprise1
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 ...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

No data available
AppOptics, SolarWinds TraceView, Librato
 

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
TraxoCovea Insurance BTE TechnologyDatarista
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. SolarWinds AppOptics and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.