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

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
4th
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 (4th), Container Monitoring (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
SolarWinds Network Device M...
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
28th
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 June 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Datadog is 2.3%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is 0.9%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog2.3%
SolarWinds Network Device Monitor0.9%
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

"One of the solution's greatest aspects is its overall simplicity; it is very easy to use and easier to handle than other brands we have access to."
"I appreciate that they are constantly adding new features, some of which we haven't yet had a chance to implement."
"The solution has helped out organization gain improved visibility."
"The server monitoring, service monitoring, and user session monitoring are extremely helpful, as they allow us to be alerted ahead of time of issues that users might experience."
"This solution has improved our organization by giving us deeper insight into what's running in our clusters and their performance of it."
"Being able to click on a UI and be pointed to the exact source of the problem is like magic."
"The visibility that it provides is valuable. It is helping in being proactive around incident management. It is helping us to be able to get more visibility into our customers' applications so that we can assist them at the application layer. We also provide them the infrastructure from an AWS standpoint. We are able to make sure that our customers are aware of certain critical things around the analytical piece of either the network or the application. We're able to call customers before they even know about the issue. From there, we can start putting together some change management processes and help them a bit."
"The ability to create custom dashboards has been incredibly useful, allowing us to visualize key metrics and KPIs in a way that makes sense for different teams and stakeholders."
"This product proactively tells us about issues before the users notice."
"SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is a straightforward product with valuable functionality."
"Overall, it is a good user experience and the dashboards are very usable."
"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."
"The deployment process is quick."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is it can alert you when a device is not working."
"This product has been quite stable and we are very likely to continue using it in the future."
"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."
 

Cons

"There is always room for improvement when dealing with cloud-based technologies."
"To be very fair, I haven't had enough experience with Datadog to pick out improvements."
"One area where Datadog can be improved is around alert quality. In the beginning, it tends to generate many alerts, and without proper tuning, many of them are not actionable."
"I'm not sure if Datadog can monitor K8s deployments in real-time. For instance, being able to see a deployment step by step visually. This would be helpful if there were any incidents during the deployment."
"The real issue with this product is cost control."
"I would appreciate seeing it as an app or mobile app for quicker issue tracking."
"I want to applaud the efforts in making the UI extremely usable and approachable. My suggestion would be to take another look at how the menu structure is put together, however. Even after using the platform mostly every day for months, I still find myself trying to find a service or feature in the menus."
"We have contact with many customers that cover many areas, so we have cases where the infrastructure administration could be improved."
"The security could always be improved."
"The main disadvantage of SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is the licensing cost, which is expensive."
"The solution lacks in performance monitoring."
"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 reporting feature needs improvement because we are unable to configure reports that were included during initial implementation."
"The security needs improvement, which is why we are moving away from Solar Winds. We have security concerns."
"The initial setup is a bit complex. It's not for anyone who is a beginner to work in the products to do it."
"The solution should have AI-powered issue-resolving capabilities"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 is better than some competing products."
"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."
"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"This solution is budget friendly."
"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."
"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
"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."
"Well, we had a perpetual license and the renewal was $20 to $25,000."
"I find the cost of SolarWinds Network Device Monitor reasonable for our company. Though, I'm not aware of the exact licensing cost."
"When compared with other solutions SolarWinds is more expensive."
"The product is expensive."
"The enterprise license is good for the SolarWinds Network Device Monitor. However, it is expensive, they should reduce their price."
"SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is not an expensive solution."
"The price of the SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is good."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Network Monitoring Software solutions are best for your needs.
902,588 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise49
Large Enterprise100
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 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...
What is your primary use case for SolarWinds Network Device Monitor?
I have experience regarding the AD part, but my focus for the last 15 years has been oriented to the network side. My experience with identity tools comes more from a network perspective. We used N...
 

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: June 2026.
902,588 professionals have used our research since 2012.