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 network map is crucial in identifying bottlenecks and determining what needs more attention."
"The many dozens of integrations that the solution brings out of the box are excellent."
"Thanks to the logs, we manage to make better reports through Jira and also to trace the request with more facility than we would be able to do otherwise."
"It has a nice UI."
"The tool's deployment is easy."
"Going from viewing a metric to creating a monitor alerting on a metric is very easy."
"Flame graphs are pretty useful for understanding how GraphQL resolves our federated queries when it comes to identifying slow points in our requests. In our microservice environment with 170 services."
"Datadog has helped us a ton by allowing us to set up a multitude of easily configurable alarms across our tech stack and infrastructure."
"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."
"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."
"Monitoring of processes and services is the most valuable feature. It is not necessarily just the server alone in terms of the CPU or the memory. We can go in-depth into services and processes."
"There are many valuable features, including the network configuration manager, and the network performance manager."
"The solution is great for monitoring. If something is going wrong, we can immediately find the root cause."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is the network devices' performance monitor is the best."
"AppInsight for SQL: Enables us to see the relevant error log entries on the same page as performance parameters."
"The most valuable feature is the Access Rights Manager."
"Datadog isn't as mature as some of the established players like Dynatrace or Splunk. It's a new product, so they are constantly releasing new features, and I don't have much to complain about."
"It lacks consistency in the APIs."
"Once Datadog has gained wide adoption, it can often be overwhelming to both know and understand where to go to find answers to questions."
"Federated views for Datadog dashboards are critical as large companies utilize multiple instances of the product and cannot link the metrics or correlate the metrics together. This stunts the usage of Datadog."
"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."
"Since the Datadog platform has so many separate features, solving so many use cases, there are often inconsistencies in feature availability and interoperability between products."
"Datadog is expensive."
"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."
"It needs time-based functions for monitoring. Some things need to be polled on a specific schedule or only during a specific window."
"Downside of the tools is the web console are hung or crash. It need to improve the performance."
"This product has no real downside unless they fail to continue development of its capabilities."
"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."
"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."
"An additional feature that would improve this solution is the ability to complete root cause analysis."
"They should incorporate more artificial intelligence. There should also be more predictive features."
More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Pricing and Cost Advice →
Datadog is ranked 1st in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 136 reviews while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is ranked 19th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 36 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 AppDynamics, whereas SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is most compared with Azure Monitor, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Prometheus and ServiceNow Discovery. See our Datadog vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report.
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