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Datadog vs SolarWinds Server and Application 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 Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd), 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 Server and Appli...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
19th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.5
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (6th), Active Directory Management (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Datadog is 4.4%, down from 9.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.0%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog4.4%
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor1.0%
Other94.6%
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.
NikhilKalwint - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Specialist at ServiceIO
Monitoring over a thousand systems has improved decision making and operational visibility
From an advantage perspective, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is comparatively cheaper from a commercial point of view. It is easy to install and configure, very user-friendly, and quick to get up and running, allowing you to see the early value adds in your organization. It is compatible with most technologies for monitoring with very few chances of incompatibility. Configuration also allows us to monitor all the technical parameters we are looking for, making it a very good experience for us. The alerting feature in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is a main advantage, as it alerts based on threshold breaches and can raise tickets to the ticketing system, send SMS, and email notifications, allowing engineers to work on those tickets to resolve issues and avoid further impact. The visibility into server health is a beneficial feature that I am utilizing. We widely use various application performance metrics in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor such as database monitoring and server monitoring, which are quite good enough for any monitoring solution. We utilize the customizable dashboards in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution has helped our organization with custom events to track specific cases."
"The greatest value is integrated monitoring as it is able to quickly detect issues and improve our time to market."
"We also use APM and metrics to view the status of our Pub/Sub topics and queues, especially when dealing with undelivered messages."
"Using Datadog metrics has helped the organization a lot in many manners."
"We can handle debugging and find out why things are breaking in our applications."
"Datadog provided us the ability to monitor our cloud infrastructure (network, servers, storage), platform/middleware (database, web/applications servers, business process automation), and business applications across our cloud providers."
"We are loving the tool; it is great to have all those insights in one place."
"Datadog allows for much better visibility across our entire fleet and has saved us countless eng hours as a result."
"Manage Groups: The capability to group appropriate devices gives better visibility of sites, categories, or critical regions. The same can be used to represent a dashboard for higher management."
"The most valuable feature is the Access Rights Manager."
"It is simple to implement and can provide fairly decent Windows-based monitoring, beyond simple SNMP. It is great for monitoring newbies and smaller shops."
"SolarWinds fit the bill because it gave many possibilities in monitoring with a good amount of out of the box capabilities."
"It is easy to install and configure, very user-friendly, and quick to get up and running, allowing you to see the early value adds in your organization."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its interface, which is used for monitoring."
"AppInsight for SQL: Enables us to see the relevant error log entries on the same page as performance parameters."
"The OOTB (Out of the Box) implementation does have very good node specific pages and can provide a wealth of information."
 

Cons

"I've only been using Datadog for a few months, and at first, it was frankly overwhelming in terms of both the UI and the available capabilities."
"When the logs are too big, and Datadog splits them, the JSON format breaks and it is not so useful for us."
"One thing that I haven't been able to figure out is how to retrieve a report."
"The user interface is okay, but sometimes cost is the issue because for logging, I had to actually trim down my logs because the cost is too much."
"For specialized support, it feels like you're under-staffed, having to wait days/weeks for a solution is a big NO-NO."
"It can have a more modernized pricing mechanism. We're actually working with them to figure out how to become more modular and have a better and more modernized pricing mechanism. The issue with Datadog is that you have to buy the whole suite of different products, and you kind of get stuck in the old utilization of 40% of their suite. Most organizations today break down between application development, networking, and security. Therefore, there should be a way to break down different modules into just app dev, infosec, networking, etc. Customers have various needs across their business lines, and sometimes, they're just not willing to have tools that they're not using 100%. AppDynamics is probably a little bit better in terms of being modular."
"We primarily use the log management functionality, and the only feedback I have there is better fuzzy text searching in logs (the kind that Kibana has)."
"Our main challenge is implementing the solutions in our Kubernetes cluster, separated just as logs to the specific namespace since the volume of logs is tremendous."
"The product does not explain why a problem occurred."
"Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included."
"I had some stability issues. I lost my environment, but with the help of SolarWinds support, I was able to get back to a stable platform."
"The major concern in the product revolves around application performance monitoring since end-to-end application monitoring is not possible with the tool."
"SAM's software-defined network monitoring capability is also low and could be improved."
"It should also be easier to upgrade SolarWinds. AppDynamics is harder to deploy but easier to upgrade. So AppDynamics takes a lot of time and effort to install, but you can upgrade it in minutes. SolarWinds is the opposite. It's easy to deploy, but upgrades take forever. To date, nobody can complete it on time, so the production environment is sitting idle."
"One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules"
"Having two places to build and manage alerts is not efficient and not all alerting tools are available in the trap manager."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
"​Pricing seems reasonable. It depends on the size of your organization, the size of your infrastructure, and what portion of your overall business costs go toward infrastructure."
"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."
"Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."
"The tool is open-source."
"It has always scaled for us. Cost scales up too, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. It's reasonable for what they're providing."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"When planning for the number of licenses to purchase, make sure you understand all of the elements within an application required to really understand performance well. In our case, we quickly came to the conclusion that an unlimited license for SAM was the way to go."
"I would advise potential buyers to wait until the end of the quarter, end of year, or other time to place orders. There are actually great deals to be had at those times if your budget cycle can match up."
"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."
"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
"I have always said SolarWinds is very “proud” of their products, meaning they are expensive. I cannot afford to purchase all the licenses I need for all the SolarWinds products."
"When compared to other licensed models in the market, it stands out as one of the more cost-effective options."
"The product is expensive."
"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Educational Organization
13%
University
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Healthcare Company
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 Business17
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
 

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 needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There is definitely room for improvement besides simplifying its setup. As a non-technical person, I believe the dashboards could be improved. Everything we use appears on video walls, and we need ...
What is your primary use case for SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
I am doing research as we currently have both solutions, and I am looking to see if we need both or can manage with one. Currently, the outcome indicates that we need both. The focus point is diffe...
 

Also Known As

No data available
SolarWinds SAM
 

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
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.