Datadog vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

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Juniper Logo
389 views|290 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
Datadog Logo
22,540 views|13,375 comparisons
95% willing to recommend
SolarWinds Logo
8,706 views|4,756 comparisons
92% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 29, 2023

We compared Datadog and SolarWinds NPM across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:

  • Features: Datadog users like its customizable displays, error tracking, and advanced AI/ML capabilities. SolarWinds NPM is commended for its adaptability and extensive network surveillance functionalities.

  • Room for Improvement: Datadog could enhance its usability and reduce its learning curve. Users said integration was another pain point. SolarWinds NPM needs improvement in edge computing capabilities and data reporting. Users also said the performance could be better and that they would like to see expanded IPAM functionality.

  • Service and Support: While many users spoke highly of Datadog’s support team, others reported slow support, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. While some customers described SolarWinds support as helpful and responsive, others reported delayed responses.

  • Ease of Deployment: Datadog’s setup is considered straightforward, and users often receive help from a partner or vendor. Some users said SolarWinds NPM was straightforward to set up, while others perceived it as complex.

  • Pricing: Opinions about Datadog's price are divided. Some users found it costly, but others thought it was acceptable. Some said the pricing model could be clearer and better explained. The cost of SolarWinds NPM varies depending on the customer’s size and requirements. Some users find it costly.

  • ROI: Users said Datadog saved them time and improved visibility into security blind spots. Some users reported immediate benefits from using SolarWinds NPM in terms of security and business outcomes, while others have not.

Comparison Results: Datadog is praised for its customizability, easy setup, and robust AI features, but some users say it has room for improvement in areas like usability and integration. Datadog’s pricing and customer service received mixed reviews. SolarWinds NPM is a customizable solution that’s easy to deploy and features comprehensive network monitoring capabilities. However, some users consider it costly and voiced concerns about technical support and user experience.

To learn more, read our detailed Datadog vs. SolarWinds NPM Report (Updated: March 2024).
768,415 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."

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"It has provided visibility with ease of implementation and allowed multiple teams to quickly onboard it.""The monitoring functionality, in general, and tagging infrastructure are great.""The solution's SaaS model is easy to manage and works well in single- or multi-cloud environments.""This is definitely a good product and I would consider them one of the leaders within the application monitoring and cloud monitoring space.""The performance of Datadog is good.""I really enjoy the RUM monitoring features of Datadog. It allows us to monitor user behavior in a way we couldn't before.""Because of our client focus, it is easy for us to sell. This is because it is easy to use and easy to set up.""The tools are powerful and intuitive to set up."

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"The ability to customize the views and dashboards is nice. SolarWinds also allows us to access the data via the API. That's probably the feature I liked the most.""The solution is very user-friendly.""This has helped us to monitor the availability of our routers, switches, servers, and virtual environments.""We have configured multiple alerts for our network devices, including routers and switches, so that we are notified if any interface goes down.""The set up was very easy. We didn't have any problems with the setup. The deployment took less than an hour.""It covers everything from end to end, from the standpoint of endpoint machines and the routers and switches. The switch port also comes there.""I like that SolarWinds NPM is a strong tool for monitoring network devices, switches, and routers. It's also a user-friendly tool. My team also likes how scalable it is.""The most valuable feature of SolarWinds NPM is the performance monitoring to see the memory, and CPU utilization."

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Cons
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."

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"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 support for front-end and mobile applications. Right now, it is mostly all back-end stuff. Being able to do some integration with our front-end products would be awesome.""The documentation leaves a lot to be desired for new users.""Datadog lacks a deeper application-level insight. Their competitors had eclipsed them in offering ET functionality that was important to us. That's why we stopped using it and switched to New Relic. Datadog's price is also high.""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 more tools that they can build that allow you to run AWX playbooks, or other similar fixes, would benefit clients greatly.""We have recently had a number of issues with stability and delays on logging, monitoring, metric evaluation, and alerts.""There are things about it that we would like to be fixed, such as it is taking averages of average. This results in data that we don't expect."

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"Complex and overly detailed setup.""Scalability is a bit tricky because it requires more gateways in order to get the performance you may need. It also requires a lot of licensing.""An area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the short retention period. Currently, it's just for seven days of data, which is very low, making it hard for my organization to keep that data. SolarWinds recommended a seven-day retention period, but my organization needs a fourteen-day data retention period. Hence, I'd like an increase in the retention period or the database limit in SolarWinds NPM because you can't go back to the data for any investigation if seven days have passed. Another area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the database, which needs to be a bit more mature. I want a modified database in the next release of SolarWinds NPM. I'd also like more options added to groups because, currently, it's very limited.""The only thing that can be improved is to continually add to the existing capabilities of the product.""An area for improvement would be the use of modular licenses, which are not practical for big clients.""I think Solar Winds NPM needs to create a profile with documentation responsibility.""Robustness of network element mapping tool could be better""Currently lacks integration with SMS services."

More SolarWinds NPM Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
Information Not Available
  • "​Pricing seems reasonable. It depends on the size of your organization, the size of your infrastructure, and what portion of your overall business costs go toward infrastructure."
  • "It has always scaled for us. Cost scales up too, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. It's reasonable for what they're providing."
  • "Pricing and licensing are reasonable for what they give you. You get the first five hosts free, which is fun to play around with. Then it's about four dollars a month per host, which is very affordable for what you get out of it. We have a lot of hosts that we put a lot of custom metrics into, and every host gives you an allowance for the number of custom metrics."
  • "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."
  • "The pricing and licensing through AWS Marketplace has been good. It would be nice if it was cheaper, but their pricing is reasonable for what it is. Sometimes, for their newer features, they charge as if it's fully fleshed out, even though it is a newer feature and it may have less stuff than their other items."
  • "It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
  • "The pricing came up a bit compared to their competitors. It is not that the price has risen, but that the competitors have gone down. They keep adding more features that I would have expected to be baked in at a more nominal price. I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the pricing, but not enough to jump ship."
  • "It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
  • More Datadog Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "I’d suggest that people be aware that licensing has tiers."
  • "Excluding the costs of running VMs and physical blade servers, our licensing costs run around US$200,000/year for over 60 polling engines."
  • "I think that the cost has risen, but the functionality and versatility is way above other products."
  • "The licensing model is such that you can purchase only what you need; and then grow into the next level by paying only the difference in price and the associated maintenance costs."
  • "The price points are more than competitive when compared to other vendors."
  • "I believe the original setup cost was around $3500 with an annual cost of around $1200-$1500 to renew the support license. This would bring the average day-to-day cost of around $5-$6 over three years."
  • "You have to license it per year, for the support. You don't really need to have support once you've already set it up. Once you install SolarWinds, you can skip on the licensing. It will still work."
  • "The pricing needs to be improved. It is too high. One full engine costs around $10 000, which is why we don't have high availability right now."
  • More SolarWinds NPM Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want using these, but they require quite some expertise before you can use them. Then there are the ones that are not open source, the enterprise softwares and cost you some money, but on the other hand, they are extremely easy to set-up and learn. You can have them up and running in a matter of minutes. And then there are those which are completely cloud based. They can be free of cost or charge some money depending on the software. The good thing about these is that you don’t have to install any extra software, and it can be managed completely online but then again these have limited features and you cannot exploit them to the full extent as you can do with the open-source and to some extent the enterprise software, so I won’t suggest you to use these, because these are generally not the complete solutions and require other support software to achieve the same. Below I have listed the outstanding pros and cons of the various Network analyzers that you can look into Nagios Pros: Nagios offers an extensive set of collector plug-ins that allows users to gather performance and availability data from a broad range of operating systems, including  Windows and Netware Nagios… Read more →
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points.
    Top Answer:The product is not expensive. I rate the product’s pricing a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.
    Top Answer:The Wi-Fi side needs improvement. In most warehouse environments, there are shortfalls in such conditions. We often face… more »
    Top Answer:There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems… more »
    Top Answer:With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times… more »
    Top Answer:Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was the… more »
    Top Answer:It actually depends on the exact purpose or kind of devices (network devices, servers, something else). Some tools are… more »
    Top Answer:From my point of view, SolarWind is the best tool.
    Top Answer:We are partners with SolarWinds and we sell a lot of Network management to large enterprises also because of… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
    Learn More
    Overview

    Juniper Mist Premium Analytics is a comprehensive network analytics solution that provides organizations with valuable insights into their network performance and user experience. The primary use case of this product is to enable IT teams to proactively monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize their network infrastructure.

    The most valuable functionality of Juniper Mist Premium Analytics is its AI-driven insights and recommendations. Leveraging machine learning algorithms, it analyzes vast amounts of network data to identify anomalies, predict potential issues, and suggest remediation actions. This proactive approach helps organizations minimize network downtime, improve user experience, and optimize network performance.

    By providing real-time visibility into network performance, Juniper Mist Premium Analytics helps organizations quickly identify and resolve network issues. It offers detailed analytics on network traffic, application performance, and user behavior, allowing IT teams to pinpoint the root cause of problems and take immediate action. This not only reduces troubleshooting time but also enhances overall network reliability.

    Furthermore, Juniper Mist Premium Analytics enables organizations to optimize their network infrastructure. It provides insights into network capacity utilization, application usage patterns, and user behavior, allowing IT teams to make informed decisions about network design, resource allocation, and capacity planning. This helps organizations to ensure that their network is efficiently utilized and can support the growing demands of their users.

    Datadog is a cloud monitoring solution that is designed to assist administrators, IT teams, and other members of an organization who are charged with keeping a close eye on their networks. Administrators can use Datadog to set real-time alerts and schedule automated report generation. They can deal with issues as they arise and keep up to date with the overall health of their network while still being able to focus on other tasks. Users can also track the historical performance of their networks and ensure that they operate at the highest possible level.

    Datadog Benefits

    Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by deploying Datadog include:

    • Gain an integrated view of the services and programs that IT teams are employing across their networks. Users can view and monitor all of the disparate programs that they have running across their networks with this one solution. They can track these programs across the entirety of the data’s life cycle.
    • Analyze and utilize massive amounts of data in real time. Datadog’s dashboards gather data in real time. Administrators can utilize their network’s data the minute that it becomes relevant to them. Decisions can be made based on the most current information available.
    • Keep your cloud network secured against digital threats. Datadog enables users to create alerts that will notify the minute that threats arise. IT teams and administrators can rapidly address any issue that comes up and prevent any existing problem from growing worse.
    • Easily get it up and running. Users can set up Datadog, configure it, and employ API integrations to connect it to external solutions with ease.

    Datadog Features

    • Customizable and prefabricated monitoring dashboards. Administrators are supplied with two different types of dashboards that they can choose from when they are setting up Datadog. They can customize the dashboards to fit any specialized monitoring need. Additionally, users can choose to use prefabricated dashboards that come with the solution.
    • Disaster recovery feature. Datadog has a built-in feature that enables organizations to continue functioning if some disaster strikes their network. If the network suffers damage, Datadog can restore lost data and infrastructure. Should a digital threat do damage to the network, Datadog ensures that the damage is not irreparable.
    • Vulnerability scanning tool. Users can keep ahead of threats to their networks by employing Datadog’s vulnerability scanning feature. This tool scans the entirety of a user’s network and warns them if a vulnerability is detected. Users can then move to patch these holes in their security before the threat to their network can escalate.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Datadog is a solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. It can offer organizations many advantages. Two major advantages are the dashboards that users can create and the monitoring capability that it gives system administrators.

    A senior manager in charge of site reliability engineering at Extra Space Storage writes, “The dashboards we created are core indicators of the health of our system, and it is one of the most reliable sources we have turned to, especially as we have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately. We can usually rely on logs to tell us what the apps are doing.”

    Housecall Pro’s senior director of DevOps writes, “We value the monitoring capability since it allows us to be pushed alerts, rather than having to observe graphs continually.

    SolarWinds NPM is a network monitoring solution that enables you to detect, diagnose, and resolve network performance issues and outages quickly and efficiently. The solution is a powerful tool that can help you increase service levels, reduce downtime with multi vendor network monitoring, simplify the management of complex network devices, improve operational efficiency, and much more.

    SolarWinds NPM Features

    SolarWinds NPM has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Increased scalability
    • Fault, performance, and availability monitoring
    • Dynamic network discovery and mapping
    • Cross-stack network data correlation
    • Customizable topology
    • Dependency-aware intelligent alerts
    • Intelligent maps
    • Automated capacity forecasting, alerting, and reporting
    • Logical and physical network monitoring
    • Monitor Azure vNet gateway visibility

    SolarWinds NPM Benefits

    There are several benefits to implementing SolarWinds NPM. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Comprehensive monitoring for advanced network devices: With SolarWinds NPM, you can gain insight into the health and performance of your load balancers, Cisco ASA and Palo Alto Networks, firewalls, and Cisco Nexus switches.
    • Hardware health monitoring: SolarWinds NPM makes it easy for you to monitor, alert, and report on key device metrics, including power supply, fan speed, and temperature.
    • Customizable performance and availability reports: With this feature, you can choose from more than 100 templates to schedule and also generate custom network performance reports.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the SolarWinds NPM solution.

    PeerSpot user Andrew N., Senior Network Engineer at Element Critical, says, “The "Performance Analyzer" feature is the solution's most valuable aspect. It's able to do the bounded graphs of all the interface stats, from errors to broadcasts and to current traffic. With a click of a button you're able to, in one interface, look at historical data for those items.” He also adds, “From the troubleshooting point of view, just having that peace of mind is great. And, The solution is extremely stable. We haven't had any issues in that regard. We haven't had issues with bugs, glitches, or crashes."

    Daniel S., Systems and Data Warehouse Supervisor at MMSD, mentions, “The alerting and usage tracking is a valuable feature because it alerts us when we're getting near capacity on disk space, network utilization or processor utilization. It helps us manage our capacity and enables us to be proactive.”

    A Senior Vice President and CIO at a financial services firm explains, “As we look to add more servers to our virtual environment and to understand the impact, the solution allows us to dig into the historical charts related to capacity planning. It also gives us visibility of spikes and allows us to track down the reasons for their occurrences. So too, it makes room for potential processes that have gotten hung or runaway and to know when it's time to reboot a server or service.”

    Dinesh N., Digital Innovation at Bobcat Company, states, “The best part of the solution is the sharing display. It gives a general public ID wherein everyone can link to a public display. That's a good feature.”


    Fazal A., Implementation & Support Specialist at 360Factors, comments, “We have configured multiple alerts for our network devices, including routers and switches, so that we are notified if any interface goes down. In the event an interface goes down, we have multiple reports that include availability monitoring, network uptime monitoring, and network downtime monitoring. These reports are on multiple schedules such as the end of the day, end of the last business day of the week, monthly, and quarterly. This gives us the ability to provide reports to our management and let them know the performance of our network.”

    Sample Customers
    Information Not Available
    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
    Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Government8%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm22%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    Insurance Company5%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization31%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company12%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Healthcare Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization50%
    Computer Software Company7%
    Government5%
    Manufacturing Company5%
    Company Size
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise63%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business37%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise44%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business16%
    Midsize Enterprise38%
    Large Enterprise46%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise49%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business12%
    Midsize Enterprise55%
    Large Enterprise33%
    Buyer's Guide
    Datadog vs. SolarWinds NPM
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    768,415 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Datadog is ranked 1st in Cloud Monitoring Software with 137 reviews while SolarWinds NPM is ranked 6th in Cloud Monitoring Software with 147 reviews. Datadog is rated 8.6, while SolarWinds NPM is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Datadog writes "Very good RUM, synthetics, and infrastructure host maps". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds NPM writes "High-level, comprehensive, and proactive monitoring in a user-friendly interface". Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, New Relic, AWS X-Ray and AppDynamics, whereas SolarWinds NPM is most compared with Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, ManageEngine OpManager, ThousandEyes and Wireshark. See our Datadog vs. SolarWinds NPM report.

    See our list of best IT Infrastructure Monitoring vendors, best Cloud Monitoring Software vendors, and best Network Monitoring Software vendors.

    We monitor all Cloud Monitoring Software 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.