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Datadog vs Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 19, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.5
Datadog enhances efficiency by optimizing resources, reducing downtime, and improving incident response, offering significant cost savings and performance benefits.
Sentiment score
7.5
Splunk ITSI quickly delivers ROI by enhancing visibility, reducing costs, and improving performance with centralized data and efficient analytics.
Previously we had thirteen contractors doing the monitoring for us, which is now reduced to only five.
Datadog has delivered more than its value through reduced downtime, faster recovery, and infrastructure optimization.
I believe features that would provide a lot of time savings, just enabling you to really narrow down and filter the type of frustration or user interaction that you're looking for.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.7
Datadog's customer service is praised, though technical support feedback is mixed; expertise and engagement are frequently appreciated.
Sentiment score
6.3
Splunk ITSI support is generally good, but experiences vary by company size and issue, with occasional delays reported.
When I have additional questions, the ticket is updated with actual recommendations or suggestions pointing me in the correct direction.
Overall, the entire Datadog comprehensive experience of support, onboarding, getting everything in there, and having a good line of feedback has been exceptional.
I've had a couple instances where I reached out to Datadog's support team, and they have been really super helpful and very kind, even reaching back out after resolving my issues to check if everything's going well.
The technical support is excellent, and I would rate it at ten.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Datadog is praised for scalability, easy integration, and reliable performance, but users should monitor costs as usage increases.
Sentiment score
7.7
Splunk ITSI is scalable for various deployments, though costly; supports large datasets with predictive analysis for resource optimization.
Datadog's scalability has been great as it has been able to grow with our needs.
We did, as a trial, engage the AWS integration, and immediately it found all of our AWS resources and presented them to us.
Datadog's scalability is strong; we've continued to significantly grow our software, and there are processes in place to ensure that as new servers, realms, and environments are introduced, we're able to include them all in Datadog without noticing any performance issues.
Splunk is highly scalable, with the ability to expand efficiently.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Datadog is praised for its reliability and stability, with occasional minor issues that are quickly resolved.
Sentiment score
7.8
Splunk ITSI is stable and reliable, managing large datasets efficiently, with minor challenges mainly during updates and configuration.
Datadog is very stable, as there hasn't been any downtime or issues since I've been here, and it's always on time.
Datadog seems stable in my experience without any downtime or reliability issues.
These incidents are related to log service, indexes, and metric capturing issues.
The setup, however, must be done correctly as incorrect deployment can lead to issues.
 

Room For Improvement

Datadog faces user complaints about performance, pricing, complexity, logging, notifications, integration, AI, cost control, and documentation.
Splunk ITSI needs better integration, user interface, predictive analytics, machine learning, real-time alerting, automated response, and user support.
It would be great to see stronger AI-driven anomaly detection and predictive analytics to help identify potential issues before they impact performance.
The documentation is adequate, but team members coming into a project could benefit from more guided, interactive tutorials, ideally leveraging real-world data.
In future updates, I would like to see AI features included in Datadog for monitoring AI spend and usage to make the product more versatile and appealing for the customer.
I would appreciate additional features in the next release of Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) such as cloud infrastructure monitoring including CICDs, Kubernetes, and similar technologies.
Splunk ITSI could benefit from including more features that other solutions support, such as vulnerability management modules.
 

Setup Cost

Datadog pricing is high yet reasonable; flexible subscriptions are available, but usage-based costs require careful monitoring.
Splunk ITSI is a costly but comprehensive tool, valued for its observability despite complex licensing and high pricing.
The setup cost for Datadog is more than $100.
Everybody wants the agent installed, but we only have so many dollars to spread across, so it's been difficult for me to prioritize who will benefit from Datadog at this time.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is really expensive.
Splunk ITSI tends to be more expensive compared to some open-source solutions.
 

Valuable Features

Datadog offers unified data monitoring with extensive integrations, simplifying observability, debugging, analytics, and performance tracking across platforms.
Splunk IT Service Intelligence enhances incident management with agile data handling, advanced analytics, and effective troubleshooting features for quick issue resolution.
Our architecture is written in several languages, and one area where Datadog particularly shines is in providing first-class support for a multitude of programming languages.
Having all that associated analytics helps me in troubleshooting by not having to bounce around to other tools, which saves me a lot of time.
Datadog was able to find the alerts and trigger to notify our team in a very prompt manner before it got worse, allowing us to promptly adjust and remediate the situation in time.
The predictive analysis can give you proactive information about potential bottlenecks that can occur on applications, desk, storage, SQL servers, databases, or other systems.
Splunk ITSI allows for integration with threat intelligence, enabling my organization to correlate more than two events for generating alerts.
 

Categories and Ranking

Datadog
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
206
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (4th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (3rd), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th)
Splunk ITSI (IT Service Int...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
10th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
IT Alerting and Incident Management (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Datadog is 7.4%, down from 10.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) is 0.7%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Datadog7.4%
Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence)0.7%
Other91.9%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Dhroov Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Ahmed Naguib - PeerSpot reviewer
Identifying complex diagnostics and alert management improvements needed
The best features of Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) are the APM, the Application Performance Monitoring, and the diagnostic capabilities. It is state-of-the-art. The intelligent alerting in Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) is very good. The predictive analysis can give you proactive information about potential bottlenecks that can occur on applications, desk, storage, SQL servers, databases, or other systems. It is very effective. The customizable dashboards in Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) facilitate our customers because they are highly adaptable. We have multiple types of dashboards, depending on who will be utilizing them, such as engineering, middle management, IT heads, or NOC teams that will be monitoring systems. The metrics I rely on for monitoring in Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) depend on what kind of asset or CI we are monitoring. For applications, we have the number of concurrent transactions, response time from the database, and write time on the desk. There are multiple parameters and metrics that we utilize in the monitoring part within ITSI.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise94
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise32
 

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 Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence)?
Pricing can vary significantly based on the selected modules and deployment choices. Splunk ITSI tends to be more expensive compared to some open-source solutions.
What needs improvement with Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence)?
Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) can be improved in terms of the service management function, which is the only drawback, and there are some limitations in terms of event correlation, specific...
 

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
TransUnion, Cox Automotive, Carnival Cruises, Leidos, Econocom, National Ignition Factory, Entrust Datacard, Molina Healthcare, United States Census Bureau
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
872,029 professionals have used our research since 2012.