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Alluvio AppResponse vs Datadog comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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

Alluvio AppResponse
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
47th
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
55th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Datadog
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
1st
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Alluvio AppResponse is 0.5%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 5.3%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Datadog5.3%
Alluvio AppResponse0.5%
Other94.2%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

SK
Senior Technical Engineer at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
Identifies and analyzes performance issues quickly using in-built AI and ML
With Alluvio AppResponse, there is an in-built analytical analysis with AI and ML, which identifies and provides data such as the number of TCP retransmits, web access time, total connection time out, total connections established, and server-side errors. The RTCC response time composition chart is crucial because it helps pinpoint the issue's origin, whether from the server, network, or application side. It's a superb product when compared to SolarWinds SAM, which is agent-based, while Alluvio AppResponse captures all traffic from the core switch.
Dhroov Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
Site Reliability Engineer at Grainger
Has improved incident response with better root cause visibility and supports flexible on-call scheduling
Datadog needs to introduce more hard limits to cost. If we see a huge log spike, administrators should have more control over what happens to save costs. If a service starts logging extensively, I want the ability to automatically direct that log into the cheapest log bucket. This should be the case with many offerings. If we're seeing too much APM, we need to be aware of it and able to stop it rather than having administrators reach out to specific teams. Datadog has become significantly slower over the last year. They could improve performance at the risk of slowing down feature work. More resources need to go into Fleet Automation because we face many problems with things such as the Ansible role to install Datadog in non-containerized hosts. We mainly want to see performance improvements, less time spent looking at costs, the ability to trust that costs will stay reasonable, and an easier way to manage our agents. It is such a powerful tool with much potential on the horizon, but cost control, performance, and agent management need improvement. The main issues are with the administrative side rather than the actual application.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Riverbed's product is a superb product."
"The most valuable feature is performance monitoring."
"With some APM solutions, it can take a long time to check a periodic report, but you can get all the necessary details quickly with AppResponse."
"AppResponse is a total solution that gives you end-to-end visibility into applications at all levels, from Layer 1 to Layer 7. We can trace all those sections: physical, IP, transport, presentation, application, etc. It gives us the full picture."
"When it comes to the ability to scale up the product, this is suitable for small medium and large environments,"
"You need a packet capture device to perform any type of network monitoring. It helps ensure that network overloads don't happen with alerts allowing for proactive decisions."
"We really like the scalability capabilities."
"The most valuable feature of Alluvio AppResponse is the actual response time for measuring performance."
"The dashboards are super convenient to us for a more zoomed out view of what is going on with each integration that we utilize."
"Datadog has positively impacted my organization by making finding and resolving issues a lot easier and efficient."
"The most valuable aspects of the solution include log search to help triage specific problems that we get notified about (whether by alerts we have configured or users that have contacted us)."
"Datadog agents act as an integration to different services, providing easy access and management."
"The platform appeals to companies spanning many industries on a global scale."
"Across CCM and the rest of Datadog, I like how sharable everything is."
"Its integration definitely stands out. It provides seamless monitoring of all our systems, services, apps, and whatever else we secure and monitor. Visualizations have become simpler with dashboards. We are getting visibility into systems, services, and apps stack through a single pane of glass, which is good. We are able to put logs in context."
"The application performance monitoring is pretty good."
 

Cons

"The initial setup is straightforward, but you have to know a little about the product. It's not for everybody to just plug and play. If you know how the solution is implemented then it is straightforward."
"Integration between NPM and APM solutions would improve efficiency. There is no agent on the server site related to AppResponse."
"They need to better integrate with products and solutions from different vendors."
"Alluvio AppResponse should improve its ability to expand across multiple operating systems."
"The pricing is on the higher side of things. If they could lower it, that would be ideal."
"The recent changes in corporate structure may have caused some decrease in support quality."
"Need to bring back the NetFlow module for AppResponse."
"The reporting models need improvement as most of the time, we have to customize the reports manually."
"We did have an issue where a synthetic test was set up before the holiday break, and we were quickly charged a great amount. Our team worked with Datadog, and they were able to help us out since it was inadvertent on our end and was a user error."
"I would love to see more metrics or analytics in IoT devices."
"Lacks some flexibility in the customization."
"The product is quite complex, and there are so many features that I either didn't know about or wasn't sure how to use."
"There are some areas on log filtering screens where the user interface can take some getting used to."
"As a new customer, the Datadog user interface is a bit daunting."
"One area where I was really looking for improvement was the CSPM product line. I had really wanted to have team-level visibility for findings, since the team managing the resources has much more context and ability to resolve the issue, as the service owner. However, this has been added to the announcement in a recent keynote."
"Auto instrumentation on tracing has not been very easy to find in the documentation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is a little bit high, especially because we have to pay an import tax."
"It is costly for small and medium businesses."
"The solution is no more expensive than other products."
"The licensing model is expensive compared to its competitors, but the service it gives to your business, and the data quality, means that it's worth it."
"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"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."
"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."
"Pricing is somewhat affordable compared to other solutions but in order to really lower the costs of other products you need to plan very carefully your resources usage, otherwise, it can get expensive real quick."
"Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."
"The tool is open-source."
"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Performing Arts
14%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Media Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise99
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Riverbed SteelCentral AppResponse?
The pricing of Riverbed Alluvio AppResponse is really high. Very few customers buy Riverbed because many do not have the sufficient budget. Its pricing is comparatively higher than SolarWinds. Rive...
What needs improvement with Riverbed SteelCentral AppResponse?
The reporting models need improvement as most of the time, we have to customize the reports manually. Additionally, a feature similar to SolarWinds AppStack, which provides a holistic view of the i...
What is your primary use case for Riverbed SteelCentral AppResponse?
We are the partner of Riverbed. Once any customer buys the Riverbed product, we deploy and configure it to meet their use cases. Alluvio AppResponse can identify if a page or an application is slow...
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 ...
 

Also Known As

Riverbed AppResponse, OPNET SteelCentral AppResponse, ACE Live, OPNET, AppResponse Xpert
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

N11.com, OneMain Financial, China Bank, Halkbank, Kaust
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Alluvio AppResponse vs. Datadog and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
881,733 professionals have used our research since 2012.