CA App Synthetic Monitor vs Datadog comparison

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CA App Synthetic Monitor

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

Datadog and CA App Synthetic Monitor are products in the IT monitoring space. Data comparisons suggest Datadog has the upper hand with its feature set and support, while CA App Synthetic Monitor excels in synthetic monitoring capabilities.

Features: Datadog provides comprehensive monitoring capabilities, real-time analytics, and flexible integration options. CA App Synthetic Monitor offers specialized synthetic transaction monitoring, ideal for performance tracking and uptime measurement, focusing on synthetic monitoring needs.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Datadog enables straightforward cloud integration with extensive customer support. CA App Synthetic Monitor allows easy setup with limited management for complex environments, providing straightforward albeit somewhat limited deployment options.

Pricing and ROI: Datadog offers a flexible pricing model with moderate setup costs, suitable for businesses seeking comprehensive monitoring. CA App Synthetic Monitor, with higher initial costs, provides notable ROI for synthetic monitoring-focused organizations. Datadog delivers broader value across functionalities, and CA App Synthetic Monitor justifies its price with dedicated capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed CA App Synthetic Monitor vs. Datadog Report (Updated: March 2026).

CA App Synthetic Monitor 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

CA App Synthetic Monitor

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

68th

Average Rating

7.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Datadog

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

1st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

209

Ranking in other categories

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)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of CA App Synthetic Monitor is 0.5%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 5.2%, down from 9.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Datadog	5.2%
CA App Synthetic Monitor	0.5%
Other	94.3%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

reviewer2286675

System Administrator at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

A reliable solution for SSL offloading and to encrypt outside traffic

If you are responsible for monitoring the logs in F5, it isn't very easy. The format is complicated compared to different vendors. For example, Fortinet and Cisco have feasible formats for sending and fetching logs. Suppose I'm monitoring the logs and everything, and when I am retrieving logs from F5, I want to know whether it is regular traffic or any abnormality is happening. The logs itself is not user-friendly. It may not give you a clear way of what's happening. You have to go through different websites and work on it. You have to waste so much time on it.

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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.

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

"From our experience, it really helps managers in measuring application SLAs and viewing historical performance data."

"Each had strengths in one area or another, but CA covered the majority of our needs end-to-end."

"The server monitoring, service monitoring, and user session monitoring are extremely helpful, as they allow us to be alerted ahead of time of issues that users might experience."

"It has turned into an operational dashboard. If you felt something is going wrong, you can immediately open up Datadog. It has been our go to application because we know the answer will be there."

"Even if we don't end up using Datadog, it revealed problems and optimizations to us that weren't obvious before."

"Datadog documentation on web pages has improved a lot and is pretty easy to follow and find."

"It has enhanced the performance of my team."

"The solution has offered increased visibility via logging APM, metrics, RUM, etc."

"The solution has improved the organization by providing good insights into app performance and offering good dashboards."

"We also use APM and metrics to view the status of our Pub/Sub topics and queues, especially when dealing with undelivered messages."

More Datadog pros

Cons

"Pricing makes little sense. We had examples where it would be cheaper to have two basic accounts than one intermediate."

"The RBMS component is limited as you can only record using Internet Explorer."

"The error traceability is an area that can be improved."

"As Datadog is a bit on the expensive side, I would recommend it for simple, uncomplicated, solutions."

"The product can be improved by allowing the grouping of APIs to add variables. That way, any API with a unique ID could be grouped together."

"Other than being restricted by cost, Datadog's scalability has been a little bit of a challenge to do the initial installation of the agent."

"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."

"Datadog is so feature-rich that it is often hard to onboard new folks and tough to decide where to invest time."

"The incident management beta looks promising, but it is still missing the ability to automatically create incidents based on certain alerts."

"Datadog needs more local Asia-Pacific support, and if they don't have a SaaS solution in Asia-Pacific, they should offer an on-prem version. I'm told that's not possible."

More Datadog cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"The solution is fairly priced but history and log storage can get costly depending on your needs."

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

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

"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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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885,264 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	81
Midsize Enterprise	46
Large Enterprise	99

Questions from the Community

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Any advice about APM solutions?

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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...

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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 ...

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Product Reports

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Download CA App Synthetic Monitor product report

Download Datadog product report

Also Known As

CA ASM

No data available

Overview

IT organizations require full visibility into business-critical applications regardless of where they're hosted in order to maintain service levels and proactively deal with issues before the end-user is impacted. CA App Synthetic Monitor uses synthetic transactions to provide performance insight for these applications no matter where they're hosted: outside the firewall, in the cloud or delivered via a managed service provider (MSP). Delivered as software as a service, CA App Synthetic Monitor provides end-to-end transaction response time visibility into cloud, mobile and traditional web applications using synthetic transactions delivered by a network of 95 monitoring stations across six continents, 48 countries, 93 cities and 15 time zones.

Broadcom

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

Lexmark

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

CA App Synthetic Monitor vs. Datadog