We performed a comparison between Datadog and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Datadog offers impressive features like interactive displays and data analysis, error detection and centralization of logs, ease of use for developers, and adaptability with AI and ML. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is praised for its straightforward installation process, user-friendly interface, robust monitoring abilities, and AppStack functionality for identifying and resolving problems. Datadog could enhance its usability, integration, user interface intuitiveness, learning curve, monitoring of external websites, SSL security, setup complexity, security features, and customization flexibility. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could benefit from improvements in stability, flexibility, ease of use, performance, integration, pricing, reporting feature, and code-level monitoring.
Service and Support: Customers have generally praised the availability and promptness of Datadog's customer service and support. However, there have been occasional instances of slow or unresponsive support, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor support services have received mixed feedback. Some customers have recommended enhancements in turnaround time and escalation procedures.
Ease of Deployment: Datadog's initial setup is considered user-friendly and simple, with support readily available. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor does not require installation as it is a cloud solution, however, upgrades can be time-consuming.
Pricing: Some users find Datadog's setup cost to be expensive, while others find it reasonable compared to other solutions. The pricing model for Datadog is considered confusing and lacks documentation. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor's pricing has received mixed reviews, with some finding it overpriced and others considering it reasonable.
Comparison Results: Datadog is preferred over SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor. Users praised Datadog for its user-friendly interface, easy setup, comprehensive dashboards, and reporting options, effective error reporting and log centralization features, and its ability to cater to the needs of development teams. Additionally, users appreciated the wide range of integrations available with Datadog and its flexibility in monitoring and analyzing data.
"The RUM solution has improved our ability to triage faster and hand more capabilities to our customer support."
"The service catalog helped improve our organization by giving a good view of the flow for our microservices applications."
"Datadog has a lot of features to be able to drill down deep into the swath of logs that our platforms generate."
"This spectrum of solutions has allowed us to track down bugs faster and more rapidly, which allows us to limit revenue lost during downtime."
"Anything I've wanted to do, I found a way to get it done through Datadog."
"The Datadog suite has allowed us to easily integrate log collection into all of our services and quickly detect unexpected changes in system data to declare security incidents."
"Their interface is probably one of the easiest things to use because it lets non-developers and non-engineers quickly get access to metrics and pull business value out of them. We could put together dashboards and give it to people who are non-technical, then they can see the state of the world."
"Datadog's log aggregation is really helpful since it lets me and every other engineer on my team login, view, and share logs when we need to debug our application."
"The features like trends, capacity planning, recommendations, and diagnostics are the main items I focus on for added value."
"AppInsight for SQL: Enables us to see the relevant error log entries on the same page as performance parameters."
"The solution can be deployed quickly."
"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."
"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities."
"The more valuable feature of this solution is the Exchange feature."
"I am impressed with the tool's AppStack feature which mainly helps us in the identification process. This feature can give an overview of the fault and help us identify the issues for performance degradation. Instead of looking at multiple places, we can look at a single place to identify the issues."
"We would like to see some versioning system for the Synthetic Tests so that we could have a backup of our tests since they are time-consuming to make and very easy to damage in a moment of error."
"The error traceability is an area that can be improved."
"We need more integration with security tools like Drata."
"The dashboard could be improved. It would be helpful to get a view of specific things that we need to monitor for our application."
"The real issue with this product is cost control."
"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)."
"It would be ideal if the product offered a bit more monitoring from our dashboard."
"One thing we have run into is that it is so easy to add monitoring that we turn on things without really understanding the costs."
"The templates could use improvement. Currently, they are quite complex. They should have drag-and-drop functionality instead. It would make it easier to use."
"The tool’s report feature created issues for us. We needed to gain skills to use that feature. The tool’s customization is not easy since you have to reconfigure the whole system."
"Reporting is the only thing with which we currently have challenges. They have this in two ways. There is the report writer, which is the backend, and we also have web reports, which are on the console. So, they have removed the report writer for the backend reports, and we are making use of the web console, but most of the users are not finding it very interesting to use the frontend reports. I would like them to bring back the report writer. That's the key area within it to improve on the reporting. If they can bring back the report writer, then most users will actually be comfortable. I have some customers who are trying to export their report to an Excel format, but it is not possible because they said any report that has been done from the web console cannot be exported to Excel, but most of the customers need to export their reports to Excel. That's one area they need to work on."
"SAM's software-defined network monitoring capability is also low and could be improved."
"One area that could benefit from improvement is its performance"
"In terms of the dashboards on offer, they should work to improve them. The types of dashboards that you get in terms of the graphs on offer aren't ideal right now."
"Nodes in Azure are able to be monitored with the use of agents, but this does not apply to cloud service offerings that are not node based."
"This product has no real downside unless they fail to continue development of its capabilities."
More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Pricing and Cost Advice →
Datadog is ranked 1st in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 137 reviews while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is ranked 17th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 38 reviews. Datadog is rated 8.6, while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Datadog writes "Very good RUM, synthetics, and infrastructure host maps". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor writes "We use this product for base and application monitoring. ". Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, New Relic, AWS X-Ray and Elastic Observability, whereas SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is most compared with Azure Monitor, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Prometheus and Nagios XI. See our Datadog vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report.
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We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
