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 visibility into our network has allowed for quick diagnosis of failures, identification of underutilized or over-utilized resources, and allowed for cloud cost optimization opportunities."
"We enjoy the multistep API tests."
"The tool's deployment is easy."
"The management of SLOs and their related burn-rate monitors have allowed us to onboard teams to on-call fast."
"The integration into AWS is key as well as our software is currently bound to AWS."
"Datadog has made it much easier to have a central place for people to look for logs and made it much easier to notify them of any elevated error rates or failures."
"It is great that creating an incident is possible from Slack while having all the relevant data in Datadog."
"The biggest thing I liked was the combination of all the things - monitoring, log aggregation, and profiling."
"Solarwinds has an open database that allows you to do serious integrations. It doesn't matter which service desk you have, you can implement and integrate it with SolarWinds."
"SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting"
"The solution is great for monitoring. If something is going wrong, we can immediately find the root cause."
"The solution is end-to-end from the network and the application to the processes. Everything about the enterprise infrastructure is being covered by the solution. It's easy to use and easy to navigate and one of the leaders among monitoring solutions."
"There are many valuable features, including the network configuration manager, and the network performance manager."
"AppInsight. Provides a simple way to get very in-depth monitoring configured for our most popular applications. Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint."
"This product can monitor application environments no matter where they reside and provides capabilities for deep insight into infrastructure."
"SolarWinds SAM has provided us with dynamic thresholds based on historical trends and requirements. The threshold gets configured automatically, so it's no longer necessary to configure it manually every time."
"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."
"The product needs to have more enterprise approach to configuration."
"The current way accounts are billed could be vastly improved - especially when involving multiple organizations across multiple accounts in combination with reserved commitments."
"I'm still exploring the trial version, and it is fine. One thing that I haven't been able to figure out is how to retrieve a report. This is something that could be improved. I probably need to navigate to a place to access the reports."
"I would love to see more metrics or analytics in IoT devices."
"We have recently had a number of issues with stability and delays on logging, monitoring, metric evaluation, and alerts."
"The product could do better with its notifications."
"Sometimes, it takes a long time to load the dashboard if we have many charts."
"SAM's software-defined network monitoring capability is also low and could be improved."
"They should incorporate more artificial intelligence. There should also be more predictive features."
"Currently SolarWinds SAM offers AppInsight for modern versions of: IIS, Exchange, SQL Server. They have shown to be powerful and insightful tools. However, AppInsight needs to be offered for more applications: Citrix, SharePoint, AX, etc."
"A lot of times, we have to do a lot of manual cleanups."
"Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL."
"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."
"Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included."
"The stability, flexibility, and ease of use could be improved."
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 18th 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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