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Datadog vs SolarWinds Network Device Monitor 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
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
SolarWinds Network Device M...
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
27th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Datadog is 2.4%, down from 3.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is 0.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Datadog2.4%
SolarWinds Network Device Monitor0.8%
Other96.8%
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.
SG
IT Infrastructure Senior Network Technician at Autoliv
Offers some features but needs better customization and analysis tools
There are solutions that can perform better, but due to pricing for our corporate implementation, we had to stay with this solution. It accomplishes the necessary tasks, but there is room for improvement. The features are not as customizable as we would prefer, but they are workable. If configured properly, you can perform a drill-down analysis. However, I have not used this feature much for our infrastructure on the network side.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I find the greatest feature is being able to search across logs from various microservices."
"I have found the logging and tracing features the most valuable."
"Being able to filter requests by latency is invaluable, as it provides immediate insight into which endpoints require further analysis and optimization."
"The infrastructure monitoring capabilities are really valuable. You can just log on and see everything that is happening within an IT environment."
"The solution has offered increased visibility via logging APM, metrics, RUM, etc."
"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."
"The ease of dashboard creation and alarm monitoring has helped us not only stay competitive but be industry leaders in performance."
"Datadog infrastructure monitoring has helped us identify health issues with our virtual machines, such as high load, CPU, and disk usage, as well as monitoring uptime and alerting when Kubernetes containers have a bad time staying up."
"SolarWinds is flexible and works with multiple vendor devices."
"The alerting functionality in SolarWinds Network Device Monitor helps us stay informed during off-hours by sending alerts if our main links or devices are impacted, allowing us to quickly address any issues."
"The solution and its interface are elaborate and fully integrate all monitored items for easy analysis and troubleshooting."
"The most valuable features of SolarWinds Network Device Monitor are the reports. We are configuring the reports, and the first reports are only about the devices. We are configuring the thresholds in order to monitor all the devices."
"Overall, I rate SolarWinds Network Device Monitor ten out of ten."
"We are doing more with SolarWinds Network Device Monitor than we were doing in the past with WhatsApp Gold; when we moved to SolarWinds Network Device Monitor, the whole observability part started to grow."
"Link monitoring is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"Since our devices are spread out across the world, we can see the status of these devices without having to send someone physically to a remote location, which saves money."
 

Cons

"I love to have some DD guru come in and do a department training directly at our setup."
"We have contact with many customers that cover many areas, so we have cases where the infrastructure administration could be improved."
"Datadog has a lot of features kind of cramped into one dashboard. It's quite hard to get around what feature does exactly what. There was a steep learning curve, trying to navigate through menus."
"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."
"It's not that straightforward when creating an alert. The syntax is a little confusing."
"Billing should be more transparent."
"The real issue with this product is cost control."
"Auto instrumentation on tracing has not been very easy to find in the documentation."
"SolarWinds pricing is on the higher side, and in India, every customer is cautious about commercial aspects."
"Integration with different tools, such as ServiceNow and Excel, can be improved."
"The solution lacks in performance monitoring."
"Although I haven't explored all of the features available, I wouldn't mind if the software were made to be a bit more customizable."
"The initial setup of the SolarWinds Network Device Monitor could be easier. It took us approximately one month to complete the implementation."
"It would be beneficial if SolarWinds Network Device Monitor could provide a feature to monitor CRC errors specifically on individual interfaces rather than the entire device. This would help in detecting intermittent issues and packet drops on main links more accurately, especially when there are CRC errors. It's important for us to be aware of these issues to avoid any voice quality problems or interruptions on our MTS links."
"The solution should have AI-powered issue-resolving capabilities"
"SolarWinds Network Device Monitor lacks the granularity of other monitoring tools like LiveNX."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"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."
"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."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."
"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"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."
"SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is not an expensive solution."
"Well, we had a perpetual license and the renewal was $20 to $25,000."
"The price of the SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is good."
"I rate the product's price as three to three and a half or on a scale of one to ten, where one means low price, and ten means high price."
"When compared with other solutions SolarWinds is more expensive."
"Thankfully, it doesn't take a lot of manpower to install and deploy."
"I find the cost of SolarWinds Network Device Monitor reasonable for our company. Though, I'm not aware of the exact licensing cost."
"The product is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise99
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise14
 

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 do you like most about SolarWinds Network Device Monitor?
I rate the product's initial setup process a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one means it is a difficult phase and ten is an easy process.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Network Device Monitor?
I am not a positive person regarding SolarWinds Network Device Monitor.
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Network Device Monitor?
There are solutions that can perform better, but due to pricing for our corporate implementation, we had to stay with this solution. It accomplishes the necessary tasks, but there is room for impro...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Network Device Monitor
 

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
Air Rarotonga
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. SolarWinds Network Device Monitor and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,176 professionals have used our research since 2012.