Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Datadog vs Icinga 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

Datadog
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
3rd
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
2nd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
Icinga
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
25th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
30th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
23rd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Datadog is 2.4%, down from 3.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Icinga is 1.8%, down from 3.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Datadog2.4%
Icinga1.8%
Other95.8%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Harrison Bulley - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Net Consulting
A stable, scalable and cost-effective solution that helps with inbuilt scripts for easy modification
I think the software is quite good, but we have had problems with getting it to recognize certain areas and amend certain checks, where we needed so we would have to create backend scripts for those checks. Though, being open source, it has the support to create backend scripts, it would be better to have these scripts in-built.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has a nice UI."
"The most useful feature is the APM."
"The observability on offer is the most useful aspect of the product."
"The management of SLOs and their related burn-rate monitors have allowed us to onboard teams to on-call fast."
"It has a high-level insight into the infrastructure model of the application and provides important detailed data on the host and metrics, which is the main concern of our customers."
"Session recordings have been the most valuable to me as it helps me gain insights into user behaviour at scale."
"Synthetic testing is by far the most valuable feature in our organization."
"The ease of correcting these dashboards and widgets when needed is amazing."
"The apply rules feature saves a lot of time."
"It is really easy in Icinga to create your own plugin and integrate it without any fuss. And it works just perfectly fine."
"Icinga does the job and is fairly stable."
"The value of Icinga is that it has hundreds of plugins, so it's really easy to monitor pretty much anything."
"This solution has a self-healing handler where if the service is down, it is automatically restarted."
"We have found the solution to be stable."
"Icinga has multiple automation and integration features. There is an API for everything and a web UI for configurations. The APIs enable you to automate tasks in Icinga. We can also use plugins to talk to the API. The Icinga Director talks to a database in the background, and you can import settings from the CMDB to all systems in Icinga."
"The drafts are easy but what I like about Icinga is that there are many add-ons that you can download."
 

Cons

"We need a lot of modules since we collect all data logs from all operating systems."
"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."
"We'd like Datadog to make the log storage cheaper."
"The cost is pretty high."
"It's not that straightforward when creating an alert. The syntax is a little confusing."
"​It would be nice to be able to graph metrics by excluding certain tags (like you can do in monitors)."
"Once Datadog has gained wide adoption, it can often be overwhelming to both know and understand where to go to find answers to questions."
"The pricing model could be simplified as it feels a bit outdated, especially when you look at the billing model of compute instances vs the containers instances."
"The installation and configuration are very complex."
"The user interface should be improved."
"There is room for improvement in multi-tenancy. It's not perfect, not even really good. It's average, but it should be improved."
"We have found some problems with Nagios, and support isn't very responsive."
"It needs Trap SNMP. I saw the documentation for Zabbix, that it has its own built-in product which handles SNMP traps, and there's nothing similar in Icinga or Nagios. I think this feature is most important for me."
"One of the areas that are frustrating is remote monitoring for more than one machine."
"The tool currently fails to provide notifications to users."
"The solution lacks many features important to higher-level IT management and network support."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."
"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."
"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."
"The price is better than some competing products."
"The solution is fairly priced but history and log storage can get costly depending on your needs."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"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."
"It's an open-source solution."
"The solution is cheap."
"Even though Icinga's financial cost is low, it is an expensive product regarding the resources required to maintain and operate it."
"It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low."
"This is an open-source solution with paid support."
"The solution is free to use."
"We're using the free version of Icinga."
"The product is inexpensive compared to other DBM products."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Network Monitoring Software solutions are best for your needs.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Educational Organization
14%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise99
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

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 ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Icinga?
It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low. If you want to include this product in the services you offer to your customers, the return on i...
What needs improvement with Icinga?
There is room for improvement in multi-tenancy. It's not perfect, not even really good. It's average, but it should be improved. For instance, multi-tenancy for monitoring the virtual infrastructur...
What is your primary use case for Icinga?
We use Icinga as a monitoring solution to monitor customers' infrastructures. We work as a managed service provider, so we offer monitoring and many other services to our customers. So we use it in...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Icinga Cloud Monitoring
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
Puppet Labs, Audi, Spacex, Debian, Snapdeal, McGill, RIPE Network Coordination Centre
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Icinga and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.