Alluvio AppResponse vs Datadog comparison

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Alluvio AppResponse

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

Alluvio AppResponse and Datadog are both contenders in network and application performance monitoring. Datadog holds an advantage due to its extensive feature set, appealing to more diverse technological needs, despite Alluvio AppResponse's competitive pricing and customer support.

Features: Alluvio AppResponse offers detailed analysis of network data and application response times, providing in-depth network performance monitoring. It delivers full packet monitoring for comprehensive insights. Datadog supports broad observability across infrastructure, applications, and logs. Its enhanced integration capabilities and cloud support cater to complex cloud environments effectively. Datadog's comprehensive feature set provides extensive observability and operational efficiency, which is notably beneficial for organizations with intricate technological requirements.

Room for Improvement: Alluvio AppResponse could benefit from reduced setup requirements for quicker deployment and advanced cloud integrations. Improving scalability and expanding feature integrations would also help. Datadog can enhance by refining its interface for less technical users, providing more concise documentation for its expansive features, and optimizing resource cost management for extensive usage scenarios.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Alluvio AppResponse requires more initial setup time due to its on-premises deployment, though it offers detailed control. It is complemented by responsive customer service. Datadog's cloud-based structure allows rapid deployment with minimal setup and is supported by ample documentation and accessible customer service, making scalability more efficient for organizations.

Pricing and ROI: Alluvio AppResponse generally incurs lower initial costs, offering a better immediate ROI for organizations focusing on network performance insights. Datadog's broader capabilities lead to higher expenses but can achieve faster long-term ROI through efficiencies and savings. For businesses needing extensive observability solutions, Datadog's value often justifies its cost.

To learn more, read our detailed Alluvio AppResponse vs. Datadog Report (Updated: February 2026).

Alluvio AppResponse vs. Datadog

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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

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
Product	Market Share (%)
Datadog	5.3%
Alluvio AppResponse	0.5%
Other	94.2%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Satyam Kumar

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.

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Dhroov Patel

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.

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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."

"Ability to see end to end user, application, server, and network response time and throughput data."

"When it comes to the ability to scale up the product, this is suitable for small medium and large environments,"

"The most valuable feature of Alluvio AppResponse is the actual response time for measuring performance."

"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."

"It's a stable product. Riverbed has invested a significant amount of research and development into it, so it's a solid tool overall."

"The most valuable feature is performance monitoring."

"It provides us with complete visibility of every packet."

More Alluvio AppResponse pros

"Datadog has a lot of features to be able to drill down deep into the swath of logs that our platforms generate."

"We've found it most useful for managing Rstudio Workbench, which has its own logs that would not be picked up via Cloudwatch."

"It is great that creating an incident is possible from Slack while having all the relevant data in Datadog."

"Datadog has significantly improved our organization’s visibility into system performance and application health, and the real-time dashboards and alerting capabilities have helped our teams detect issues faster, reduce downtime, and improve response times."

"The observability pipelines are the most valuable aspect of the solution."

"APM and tracing are super useful."

"The feature I've found most valuable is the log search feature."

"If we have a large load for users using our basic Datadog, it will immediately fire off an alert notifying us either something's wrong or not."

More Datadog pros

Cons

"Integration between NPM and APM solutions would improve efficiency. There is no agent on the server site related to AppResponse."

"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."

"Alluvio AppResponse should improve its ability to expand across multiple operating systems."

"The AI features should be addressed in respect of the analysis and intelligence that must be supported and delivered in the tool to predigest the large amounts of data."

"The reporting models need improvement as most of the time, we have to customize the reports manually."

"If Alluvio AppResponse reduces its cost, it will be more beneficial for customers to monitor their application and network performance."

"The recent changes in corporate structure may have caused some decrease in support quality."

"Need to bring back the NetFlow module for AppResponse."

More Alluvio AppResponse cons

"I sometimes log in and see items changed, either in the UI or a feature enabled. To see it for the first time without proper communication can sometimes come as a shock."

"They need to offer better/more customization on what logs we get and making tracing possible on Edge runtime logs is a real requirement."

"Once agents are connected to the Datadog portal, we should be able to upgrade them quickly."

"I love to have some DD guru come in and do a department training directly at our setup."

"Datadog can be improved by addressing billing and spend calculation methods, as it would be better if these were more straightforward."

"Auto instrumentation on tracing has not been very easy to find in the documentation."

"We had limitations around RUM and our feature flag provider in Datadog because it's a back-end forward feature flag usage in our Next.js application."

"We would like to see smaller or shorter tutorials and video sessions."

More Datadog cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."

"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."

"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."

"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."

"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 solution's pricing depends on project volume."

More Datadog pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.

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881,733 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Performing Arts

14%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Media Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	10

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	80
Midsize Enterprise	46
Large Enterprise	99

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 ...

vRealize Network Insight vs Alluvio AppResponse

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Product Reports

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Download Alluvio AppResponse product report

Download Datadog product report

Also Known As

Riverbed AppResponse, OPNET SteelCentral AppResponse, ACE Live, OPNET, AppResponse Xpert

No data available

Overview

Alluvio AppResponse provides fast packet capture and storage that feeds intelligent network and application analysis with fast troubleshooting workflows to speed problem diagnosis and resolution. AppResponse delivers full stack application analysis—from packets to web pages - enabling you observe all network and application interactions as they cross the wire, whether they are encrypted or not. Using powerful, flexible network and application analytics and workflows, AppResponse speeds problem diagnosis and resolution, helping you get to answers fast

Riverbed

Datadog integrates extensive monitoring solutions with features like customizable dashboards and real-time alerting, supporting efficient system management. Its seamless integration capabilities with tools like AWS and Slack make it a critical part of cloud infrastructure monitoring.

Datadog offers centralized logging and monitoring, making troubleshooting fast and efficient. It facilitates performance tracking in cloud environments such as AWS and Azure, utilizing tools like EC2 and APM for service management. Custom metrics and alerts improve the ability to respond to issues swiftly, while real-time tools enhance system responsiveness. However, users express the need for improved query performance, a more intuitive UI, and increased integration capabilities. Concerns about the pricing model's complexity have led to calls for greater transparency and control, and additional advanced customization options are sought. Datadog's implementation requires attention to these aspects, with enhanced documentation and onboarding recommended to reduce the learning curve.

What are Datadog's Key Features?

Sharable Dashboards: Facilitate collaboration with customizable, intuitive dashboards.
Extensive Integrations: Seamlessly connects with tools like Slack and AWS to support workflows.
APM and RUM: Provides deep insights into application performance and user interactions.
Real-Time Tools: Enables agile responses to system issues with real-time monitoring.
Unified Tagging and Visualization: Eases management of complex systems with simplified visualization.

What Benefits and ROI Should Users Look For?

Efficient Troubleshooting: Centralized logging speeds up the identification and resolution of issues.
Streamlined Workflows: Integrations with popular tools enhance operational efficiency.
Improved Observability: Comprehensive monitoring improves system reliability and performance.
Resource Optimization: Efficient microservices and container management leads to better cloud resource utilization.
Responsive Alerts: Customizable alerts ensure timely identification of critical issues.

In industries like finance and technology, Datadog is implemented for its monitoring capabilities across cloud architectures. Its ability to aggregate logs and provide a unified view enhances reliability in environments demanding high performance. By leveraging real-time insights and integration with platforms like AWS and Azure, organizations in these sectors efficiently manage their cloud infrastructures, ensuring optimal performance and proactive issue resolution.

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

Alluvio AppResponse vs. Datadog