Azure Network Watcher vs Datadog comparison

Read 211 Datadog reviews

36,582 Views
9,146 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Azure Network Watcher

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

Datadog and Azure Network Watcher are both competing in the monitoring tools category. Datadog holds an upper hand with its rich features and seamless integration capabilities, appealing to cloud environments.

Features: Datadog's valuable features include sharable dashboards, seamless alerting, and easy integration with cloud services. Its ability to handle large amounts of data and provide intuitive tagging makes it easy to create monitors, enhancing efficiency. Azure Network Watcher provides essential network monitoring tools such as typology visualization, connection troubleshooter, and packet capture options, focusing on connectivity and security.

Room for Improvement: Datadog users suggest improvements in historical data performance, cost predictability, and query performance. They would like to see expanded AI capabilities within the tool. Azure Network Watcher could improve its documentation, incorporate more built-in applications for detailed traffic analysis, and integrate with Wireshark for enhanced packet capture analysis.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Datadog's flexible deployment across private, public, and hybrid cloud environments coupled with responsive customer service gives it an advantage. Azure Network Watcher is specifically tailored for public cloud environments and is praised for its user-friendly design, although there is room for improvement in service responsiveness.

Pricing and ROI: Datadog is considered expensive but delivers a positive ROI through significant operational efficiencies and comprehensive features. Azure Network Watcher offers affordable pricing for standard usage, but costs can escalate with detailed matrices. Its ROI primarily focuses on optimizing network management.

To learn more, read our detailed Azure Network Watcher vs. Datadog Report (Updated: June 2026).

Azure Network Watcher vs. Datadog

Download the complete report

Helped 900,644 peers since 2012

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

Azure Network Watcher

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

41st

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Datadog

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

4th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

211

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Azure Network Watcher is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 2.3%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Datadog	2.3%
Azure Network Watcher	0.5%
Other	97.2%

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Bijoyendra Roychowdhury

Program Manager at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

Network monitoring provides comprehensive analytics while the interface requires further development

The quality of Azure Network Watcher is quite good in terms of the in-depth analysis you can create from these matrices. There are other monitoring tools such as New Relic, AppDynamics, and Dynatrace which provide very detailed network tracing. Cloud providers such as Azure or AWS do not have that kind of GUI-based capability at this point, but using PowerShell or Python, you can develop it yourself. From the GUI perspective, it still needs to evolve in terms of quality and standard, though overall, it is quite good for troubleshooting. Regarding areas for improvement, when comparing to other network tools beyond Azure Monitor or Azure Network Watcher, those tools can identify single failed packets. This level of granularity is not currently possible with cloud providers as they only go to a certain level rather than the granular level needed for deep troubleshooting, though they do provide hints with available matrices.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The stability is very good. I rate it a ten out of ten."

"We use the solution to monitor network services. It helps to capture any network issues."

"The solution is stable."

"My advice to others looking into using Azure Network Watcher is to go for it, as you'll have the tool by default when you're subscribed to Azure VNet."

"This will help the company or the administrator, by helping them see how the traffic moves, to make sure that no entities are having any communication issues or different endpoints with task issues."

"The most valuable feature of Azure Network Watcher is using the gateways with the connections. The monitoring is useful for the logs and application insights into the data. The traffic filtering issues when it comes to deploying those applications are helpful."

"The most valuable features I have found are typology, visualization, and capture."

"The solution is stable, there are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze, it's reliable."

More Azure Network Watcher pros

"Datadog has allowed us to ensure that we can look at how our beta testers are using our new UIs and seeing where their frustration points are, which has been important to us."

"Being able to filter requests by latency is invaluable, as it provides immediate insight into which endpoints require further analysis and optimization."

"Dashboards are the most valuable."

"The most valuable feature of Datadog is its logs, as we can use the logs to conduct analysis and root cause analysis."

"Datadog has impacted our organization positively since we were previously using AppDynamics and then we switched to Datadog, which improved a lot in our alerting and monitoring in the infrastructure space and application space, allowing us to monitor business transactions and take proactive action before an end user reports it."

"Datadog solves all of these issues."

"APM and tracing are super useful."

"The two most valuable aspects are the Terraform provider for Datadog and the K8s Orchestrator."

More Datadog pros

Cons

"I still use Wireshark and Azure Network Watcher to get the required data. My team captures the traffic from Azure Network Watcher, downloads it, then imports that traffic into Wireshark to get more details on the number of hits and replies, for example. If you can do that on Azure Network Watcher and have Wireshark built-in, that would make Azure Network Watcher better. If Azure Network Watcher has that functionality where you won't need a third-party tool to get what you need, that would be helpful. I'm also expecting more from Azure Network Watcher. It's more complex than knowing how the IP flows from its source to the destination. The tool also needs more open-source features, such as having some built-in Wireshark that improves monitoring for customers. Sometimes, you encounter a VPN tunnel, network, or routing issue, but finding out more about the blockage is challenging. Is it one hundred percent an Azure issue? Is it a peer issue? You don't get complete information from Azure Network Watcher, so you must use other tools and depend on your strategies to resolve a specific issue. If more features could be added in the next release of Azure Network Watcher, specifically ones you can find on open-source tools, then that would be a plus point for the tool."

"The solution could use some additional components of the network culture, not only VMs. I'd like to see some additional security features because what they currently have concentrates only on the network."

"Azure is good, however, the Fortinet GUI is more intuitive and I like it more than anything else."

"Azure Network Watcher could improve by having other built-in applications, for example, an application to log activities for inbound and outbound traffic."

"Sometimes, you encounter a VPN tunnel, network, or routing issue, but finding out more about the blockage is challenging."

"Azure Network Watcher needs to have better documentation and it needs to capture information accurately."

"Technical support from Microsoft needs significant improvement compared to other product vendors."

"User experience could be improved."

More Azure Network Watcher cons

"It could use some additional features when working with metrics like Grafana or like New Relic has. Datadog does not use library technologies like Dynatrace does. Datadog has machine learning too, but it does not have this option in all layers of monitoring like infrastructure service process in applications."

"The real issue with this product is cost control."

"The product could do better with its notifications. I want more technical support than conferences because technical support helps with setting up the product much easier."

"The pricing nowadays is quite complex."

"Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis. It's quite expensive."

"In terms of application monitoring, Datadog is not up to the level that New Relic is."

"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is really expensive."

"In my experience, Datadog is stable, though there's typically at least one or two incidents per week."

More Datadog cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Price-wise, I have no information on how much Azure Network Watcher costs."

"The pricing is good. It's not too expensive."

"The price of the solution is reasonable."

"Azure Network Watcher is a little bit expensive."

"It is easy to run up a large bill, so become familiar with the cost of each piece of your bill and use the metrics they supply to estimate and monitor your bill."

"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."

"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."

"I am not satisfied with its licensing. Its payment is based on the exported data, and there was an explosion of the data for three or four weeks. My customer was not alerted, and there was no way for them to see that there has been an explosion of data. They got a big invoice for one or two months. The pricing model of Datadog is based on the data. The customer was quite surprised about not being alerted about this explosion of data. They should provide some kind of alert when there is an increase in usage."

"Sometimes it's very hard to project how much it will cost for the monthly subscription for the next month when you add certain features. Having better visibility of the cost would give a better experience."

"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."

"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."

"It has a module-based pricing model."

More Datadog pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Network Monitoring Software solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

25%

Construction Company

12%

Media Company

University

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Outsourcing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	7

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	82
Midsize Enterprise	49
Large Enterprise	100

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Network Watcher?

My experience with Azure Network Watcher regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been positive because it is integrated into the Azure ecosystem and does not require complex licensing. The...

What needs improvement with Azure Network Watcher?

From my experience, Azure Network Watcher could be improved with more centralized dashboards, longer-term traffic analytics, and easier correlation between network diagnostics and security events. ...

What is your primary use case for Azure Network Watcher?

Azure Network Watcher is my primary tool for network troubleshooting, connectivity validation, traffic analysis, and monitoring Azure network performance across customer environments. I use it regu...

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 ...

Nmap vs Azure Network Watcher

Comparisons

Compared 15% of the time

Kentik vs Azure Network Watcher

Compared 15% of the time

Ixia Network Taps vs Azure Network Watcher

Compared 8% of the time

PRTG Network Monitor vs Azure Network Watcher

Compared 7% of the time

Microsoft Network Monitor vs Azure Network Watcher

Compared 6% of the time

More Azure Network Watcher Competitors

Dynatrace vs Datadog

Compared 4% of the time

New Relic vs Datadog

Compared 3% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs Datadog

Compared 2% of the time

Azure Monitor vs Datadog

Compared 2% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Datadog

Compared 2% of the time

More Datadog Competitors

Product Reports

Azure Network Watcher

Download Azure Network Watcher product report

Download Datadog product report

Overview

Azure Network Watcher provides advanced network monitoring capabilities including packet capture, cloud-native firewall, and traffic diagnosis, aiding in VPN troubleshooting and security enforcement with enhanced visibility and alerting features.

Azure Network Watcher is essential for monitoring, diagnosing, and analyzing network traffic. It efficiently handles VPN connection issues and enhances network security by capturing and analyzing traffic to assess performance or latency problems. The tool facilitates traffic flow control, security rule verification, and bandwidth monitoring. Users benefit from its capabilities in diagnosing service connections, offering insights into network activity, and identifying potential threats, crucial for maintaining compliance and efficient network management.

What are the key features of Azure Network Watcher?

Packet Capture: Enables detailed network traffic inspection to troubleshoot issues.
Cloud-Native Application Firewall: Provides enhanced protection for applications running in the cloud.
Traffic Monitoring: Allows for real-time analysis and troubleshooting of network traffic.
NSG Flow Logs & AI-Based Monitoring: Enhances flow control and threat detection.
Alerting & Threshold Configuration: Offers customizable alerts via Azure Monitor for proactive management.

What benefits can users look for in reviews?

Improved Network Security: Helps in identifying and mitigating threats efficiently.
Enhanced Visibility: Provides clear insights into network operations and potential issues.
Compliance Support: Assists in maintaining regulatory compliance with thorough monitoring capabilities.
Effective Bandwidth Management: Facilitates control and optimization of network bandwidth.

In industries like finance and healthcare, Azure Network Watcher is implemented to ensure robust security and compliance, crucial for safeguarding sensitive data. It aids retail and manufacturing sectors in optimizing network performance and maintaining seamless connectivity, supporting their digital infrastructure needs.

Microsoft

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

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

Azure Network Watcher vs. Datadog