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Datadog vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications 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 Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
1st
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
2nd
Ranking in Container Monitoring
1st
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
188
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (4th), Log Management (3rd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (7th)
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
18th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
17th
Ranking in Container Monitoring
5th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Cloud Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Datadog is 9.3%, down from 12.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.7%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud 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.
ToniLindberg - PeerSpot reviewer
Troubleshooting capabilities have improved application monitoring and support engagement
I can see what happens end to end, which is pretty beneficial. The solution has troubleshooting capabilities, providing a direct connection to knowledge base articles from VMware Broadcom. When I encounter an error, I can search directly within the system to see what solutions have been employed by others. It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Datadog's learning platform is second to none."
"If we have a large load for users using our basic Datadog, it will immediately fire off an alert notifying us either something's wrong or not."
"The most valuable aspect is for us to have everything in one place."
"Datadog has helped us a ton by allowing us to set up a multitude of easily configurable alarms across our tech stack and infrastructure."
"I like that you can build out a dashboard pretty quickly. There are some things that come out of the box that you don't really need to do, which is great because they're default settings."
"Anything I've wanted to do, I found a way to get it done through Datadog."
"Going from viewing a metric to creating a monitor alerting on a metric is very easy."
"The agents feature in Datadog stands out as a valuable asset within our organization due to its robust functionality, versatility, and role in providing comprehensive monitoring and observability capabilities."
"The most valuable aspects of the solution are its ease of use and its ease of implementation."
"No issues with stability."
"People are very pleased with the implementation."
"For us, the ease of deployment in combination with TMZ was the most important part because we don't have to manually deploy a complex monitoring solution. We can more or less do that with the click of a button, and we are not dependent on the developers to provide us with all the necessary features and functions to make that work. We can just deploy it on a workload cluster and monitor at least a good part of the workload. If we want to go into detail, we clearly need to make changes, but for a good part of application monitoring, it gives us good insights."
"This solution allows me to have true visibility for any metrics when it comes to my cloud, and private."
"I gladly recommend VMware Aria Operations for Applications because it is cost effective and has commendable AI response capabilities."
"It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started."
"VMware comes with a support team, and if you have trouble, you can easily create a ticket, and VMware will help you. Therefore, the best aspect is the support."
 

Cons

"We want to reduce having to go to different screens to obtain all the information."
"In some ways, the tool has a pretty steep learning curve. Discovering the various capabilities available, then learning how to utilize them for particular use cases can be challenging."
"I spent longer than I should have figuring out how to correlate logs to traces, mostly related to environmental variables."
"Datadog could make their use cases more visible either through their docs or tutorial videos."
"One key improvement we would like to see in a future Datadog release is the inclusion of certain metrics that are currently unavailable. Specifically, the ability to monitor CPU and memory utilization of AWS-managed Airflow workers, schedulers, and web servers would be highly beneficial for our organization."
"The sheer amount of products that are included can be overwhelming."
"Its pricing model can be improved. Its settings should be improved for a better understanding of billing. They should also provide some alerts when there is an increase in the usage. For example, if there is 20% more increase from one week to another, the customer should get an alert."
"To be very fair, I haven't had enough experience with Datadog to pick out improvements."
"The solution could be expensive, which might be a limiting factor."
"The main problem I have is that the license cost is very high."
"The solution could be expensive, which might be a limiting factor."
"VMware technical support has declined since the Broadcom acquisition. Previously, they were more focused on issue resolution, but now they prioritize licensing verification before providing support."
"It could use a URL document server. Everything in the market is moving towards automation and everybody's looking for the single click operations as well relational data locality."
"The implementation is a long process that should be improved."
"They could make it more easy to plug-in data so that a nontechnical person will be able to use it, like accountants or finance people. That way they don't have to ask us."
"I would like to see integration with Kubernetes cluster and APIs so that you can manage the entire stack."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is fairly priced but history and log storage can get costly depending on your needs."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."
"It has a module-based pricing model."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"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."
"The price is better than some competing products."
"The licensing costs are very high, particularly when you consider that we have to purchase a level 1 license for every integration, such as the load balancer, HAProxy, and the MSSP. And if you want to use vSAN, that's another license. Then, of course, Tanzu Observability has its own separate license."
"Different locations require different setups. In your terms, around 300 to around 400K USD."
"I don't have the details. In our case, there is a mixture in place. We have production usage, and we are also doing training for VMware. So, we also have a training instance. It is worth the money you would spend on it. That's because if you were to build all of this yourself by using some of the open source tools, then you would need a lot of time."
"I would rate the pricing as three out of five."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
The solution includes cost drivers that can be configured according to your environment. You can input server-wise, CPU-wise, storage, and memory costs per hour or day. Once cost drivers are provid...
What needs improvement with VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
The new version 8.18 has brought significant improvements. The main purpose of using this tool is having a single console to manage all entities. The cloud integration capabilities, including priva...
What is your primary use case for VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
I have been involved in several projects where I had to implement automation and monitoring alerting. I performed automation using VMware Aria Operations for Applications. There is an automation ta...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Tanzu Observability, Wavefront, Wavefront by VMware, VMware Tanzu Observability
 

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
1. Atlassian 2. Cisco 3. Databricks 4. DigitalOcean 5. Equinix 6. Fidelity Investments 7. Google 8. Hewlett Packard Enterprise 9. Honeywell 10. IBM 11. Intel 12. JetBlue Airways 13. LinkedIn 14. Lyft 15. Mastercard 16. Microsoft 17. MongoDB 18. Netflix 19. Nvidia 20. Oracle 21. PayPal 22. Pinterest 23. Qualcomm 24. Red Hat 25. Salesforce 26. SAP 27. Spotify 28. Square 29. TMobile 30. Twitter 31. Uber 32. VMware
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.