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Datadog vs Viavi Observer Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 13, 2025

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
7.1
Number of Reviews
188
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (7th)
Viavi Observer Platform
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
95th
Average Rating
0.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Datadog is 3.3%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Viavi Observer Platform is 0.2%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer820579 - PeerSpot reviewer
Single pane of glass, easy to share dashboards, and good for monitoring
We've had some issues where we had Datadog automatically turned on in AWS regions that we weren't using, which incurred a small but steady cost that amounted to tens of thousands of dollars spent over a few weeks. I wish there was a global setting that lets an admin restrict which regions DD is turned on in as a default setup step. Sometimes, the APM service dashboard link isn't sharable. I click something in the service catalog, and on that service's APM default view, I try to share a link to that with a teammate, and they reach a blank or error screen. I wish there was more organization and detail in the suggestions when I use the query editor. I'm never quite sure when the autofill dropdown shows up if I'm seeing some custom tag or some default property, so I have to know exactly what I'm looking for in order to build a chart. It's hard to navigate and explore using the query autofill suggestions without knowing exactly what tag to look for. It's been a bit hard to understand how data gets sampled or how many data points a particular dashboard value is using. We've had questions over the RUM metrics that we see and we had to ask for help with how values are calculated, bin sizes, etc to get confidence in our data.
JeroenDubbelman - PeerSpot reviewer
The product is extremely valuable and provides a lot of functionalities and visibility to organizations
The score-based application performance ratings help the network team. Often, customers have a siloed environment for security, applications, and servers. The network team is always asked to do troubleshooting. Being able to know how well an application worked in the past and what's happening today is really helpful. If someone has a complaint and the network team says that the problem is not on their side, they must be able to demonstrate it accurately. The network team is often given the least budget and the least number of employees. So, they must be able to troubleshoot and pinpoint problems as fast as possible. If it’s a network issue, they must fix it. However, if it is a cloud problem, an ISP problem, or a problem within the server or application environment, they must be able to demonstrate it clearly. It is the real benefit they get from the solution. Some of our customers are financial institutions. They use the tool for traffic accounting, especially when they get charged by ISPs or carriers for the amount of traffic they are using. In South Africa, we have banks that pay the service providers to allow customers to use their banking apps for free. The bank pays for it, not the customers. So, they need to compare to ensure they are paying for what has been used. Viavi enables them to do that. It is pretty much the best there is in the world. There is nothing to beat it. The product is extremely valuable and provides a lot of functionalities. It's really impressive.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The seamless integration between Datadog and hundreds of apps makes onboarding new products and teams a breeze."
"The most valuable features have been: Sharable dashboards, TimeBoards, dogstatsd API, Slack Integration, Event logging API. CloudTrail Events, Tags, alerts, and anomaly detection. EBS Volume Snapshot Age, which they added upon request."
"By moving to Datadog, we did not need to manage our own monitoring infrastructure anymore."
"The flexibility to create notebooks and dashboards and fully customize them gives us a lot of power to track the exact services and endpoints we are working on."
"Dashboards and their versatility are among the most valuable features."
"Customizable views as well as the ability to "dive in" when we see someting anomalous has improved the workflow for handling incidents."
"The ingestion points are unlimited and support customization. We haven't had anything yet that we haven't been able to integrate with it."
"Datadog has so far been a breeze to use and set up."
"The score-based application performance ratings help the network team."
 

Cons

"I find the training great. That said, it is set for the LCD (lowest common denominator). Of course, this is very helpful to sell the product, yet, to really utilize the product, you need to get more detailed."
"A big problem with Datadog is the billing. They need to make the billing more user-friendly."
"It could use some additional features when working with metrics like Grafana or like New Relic has. Datadog does not use library technologies like Dynatrace does. Datadog has machine learning too, but it does not have this option in all layers of monitoring like infrastructure service process in applications."
"They should continue expanding and integrating with more third-party apps."
"Datadog does not have the feature where you can monitor external websites or check the SSL secure for websites."
"While the documentation is very good, there are areas that need a lot of focus to pick up on the key details."
"I love to have some DD guru come in and do a department training directly at our setup."
"In the past two years, there have been a couple of outages."
"The product must start using a bit more machine learning and AI, especially for security."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"The price is better than some competing products."
"The tool is open-source."
"It is easy to run up a large bill, so become familiar with the cost of each piece of your bill and use the metrics they supply to estimate and monitor your bill."
"At my last company, we did see ROI, specifically around response time. We could get to mission critical things that were down and losing revenue on immediately. So, the product paid itself back."
"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."
"The tool is very pricey."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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 Viavi Observer Platform?
The score-based application performance ratings help the network team.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Viavi Observer Platform?
The tool is very pricey. It is a challenge. I rate the pricing a ten out of ten.
What needs improvement with Viavi Observer Platform?
Customers must understand what Viavi offers. The product offers so much value that it hasn’t been able to demonstrate it to the customers. The product must start using a bit more machine learning a...
 

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
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