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Aternity AppInternals [EOL] vs Datadog comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 19, 2025

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

Aternity AppInternals [EOL]
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Datadog
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
209
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

PJ
Security & Performance Analytics Technical Specialist at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Points out the relevant problems in the enterprise and it's easy to understand
The most valuable aspect of this solution is the integration with their other systems. It's easy to understand and it points out the relevant problems in the enterprise I would like for it to have automated updates, the way the product updates itself should be all automated, as opposed to what it…
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

"Transaction Tracing is the most useful. Being able to have the transaction stitched together so we can see where the problem is has proven invaluable."
"Clicks to root cause - fast & easy to diagnose and deep-dive"
"The capability of analysing each individual transaction captured to a very low level detail (method call/line of code)."
"If you want to save time for problem resolution, and to address problem on your environments you should try Riverbed OPNET."
"We just control on the backend of AppInternals what we want to instrument and what we don't want to instrument."
"Mean time to isolate a problem has dropped by 50-75% in each region since we've deployed the Riverbed SteelCentral suite."
"I like it that one can match IPs with the application name."
"The product is very useful to find problems in middleware for the application servers, especially agent instrumentation and management is user friendly."
"APM is great and has provided low-effort out-of-the-box observability for various services."
"The full stack of integrations made it easier to monitor the different technologies and platform providers, including Software as a Service providers, that otherwise would need a lot of work and customization to be able to see what is happening."
"With Datadog, we managed to get everyone on board into a single place and a single tool, providing teams with one spot where they can check everything related to monitoring, and enabling management and leadership to have an overview of all tools working together."
"I have found error reporting and log centralization the most valuable features. Overall, Datadog provides a full package solution."
"Sometimes it's more user friendly for development teams. There are some parts of Datadog that are more understandable for development teams. For example, the APM in Datadog works more manually and works like the tools in New Relic or Grafana, or Elastic. It is easier to understand for software development teams."
"The service catalog helped improve our organization by giving a good view of the flow for our microservices applications."
"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 most useful feature is the APM."
 

Cons

"Deployment and agent patch management is not managed centrally, resulting in a large level of effort to update."
"It would be great if the solution could offer fixed bundles and more features."
"It wasn't a critical issue, but it was hot enough to where it would have been nice to get some guidance from Riverbed, but they went ahead and let us down, but that was only one occasion."
"We had issues with the end-to-end view of unique customer: reviewing end-to-end customer problems to see where a problem is about customer, code, DB or network."
"There are some functional bugs when using TTW and making report queries (to generate graphs)."
"We'd like to be able to find out performance problems on application class and methods."
"The recording mechanism for synthetic transactions could be improved as well."
"They should find a way for report generation from TTW to run quicker."
"In some ways, the tool has a pretty steep learning curve. Discovering the various capabilities available, then learning how to utilize them for particular use cases can be challenging."
"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."
"The current way accounts are billed could be vastly improved - especially when involving multiple organizations across multiple accounts in combination with reserved commitments."
"We want to reduce having to go to different screens to obtain all the information."
"We need to learn more about the session reply feature inside of DD."
"One key improvement we would like to see in a future Datadog release is the inclusion of certain metrics that are currently unavailable. Specifically, the ability to monitor CPU and memory utilization of AWS-managed Airflow workers, schedulers, and web servers would be highly beneficial for our organization."
"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is really expensive."
"There is occasional UI slowness and bugs."
 

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 licensing model for v9 is better where it is an individual license per server, while v10 licenses are per JVM/ .NET and server instance. The latter model appears to be the model that other APM vendors are using."
"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."
"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
"Datadog does not provide any free plans to use the solution. When I start with a proof of concept it would be sensible to have a free plan to test the tool and check whether it fits the requirements of the project. Before the production stage, it is always good to have a free plan with some limited features, number of requests, or logs."
"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."
"The tool is open-source."
"The price is better than some competing products."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business81
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise99
 

Questions from the Community

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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

SteelCentral AppInternals, OPNET ACE, AppInternals Xpert
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

National Instruments, Allianz
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 Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: March 2026.
884,933 professionals have used our research since 2012.