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Datadog vs SCOM 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.4
Datadog increases efficiency with improved monitoring and incident response, reducing downtime and costs despite difficulty in quantifying exact financial benefits.
Sentiment score
6.4
SCOM users experience varied ROI, with advantages in monitoring and management offset by potential licensing costs and latency issues.
Previously we had thirteen contractors doing the monitoring for us, which is now reduced to only five.
IT Manager at Liberty Mutual Insurance
Datadog has delivered more than its value through reduced downtime, faster recovery, and infrastructure optimization.
Sr. Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
I believe features that would provide a lot of time savings, just enabling you to really narrow down and filter the type of frustration or user interaction that you're looking for.
QA Engineer at Townsquare Interactive
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.7
Datadog's support is generally responsive and effective, though occasionally slow, with valuable customer service and knowledgeable assistance.
Sentiment score
6.8
Microsoft customer service is generally viewed positively, with efficient assistance and experienced staff, despite occasional consistency issues.
When I have additional questions, the ticket is updated with actual recommendations or suggestions pointing me in the correct direction.
Applications Web Services Technical Engineer at Ace Hardware
Overall, the entire Datadog comprehensive experience of support, onboarding, getting everything in there, and having a good line of feedback has been exceptional.
Systems Administrator at Townsquare Interactive
I've had a couple instances where I reached out to Datadog's support team, and they have been really super helpful and very kind, even reaching back out after resolving my issues to check if everything's going well.
Security Engineer at Invitation Homes
They often treat issues in isolation, not considering how one problem might relate to another.
Network Operations Center at Student Loans Company
When I was working directly with Microsoft at TCS, my first company, the support experience was quite smooth, and we received solutions promptly.
Assistant Manager at SMS group GmbH
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Datadog efficiently scales and integrates with cloud infrastructures, though some users face challenges with cost management.
Sentiment score
6.9
SCOM offers scalable management, efficient load balancing, and high availability but faces challenges with non-Microsoft integration and diverse device monitoring.
Datadog's scalability has been great as it has been able to grow with our needs.
IT Manager at Liberty Mutual Insurance
We did, as a trial, engage the AWS integration, and immediately it found all of our AWS resources and presented them to us.
Systems Administrator at Townsquare Interactive
Datadog's scalability is strong; we've continued to significantly grow our software, and there are processes in place to ensure that as new servers, realms, and environments are introduced, we're able to include them all in Datadog without noticing any performance issues.
Senior Custom Software Development Consultant at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
The scalability of SCOM, meaning its ability to adapt to our needs, is excellent because we are working with SQL systems and multiple servers.
Assistant Manager at SMS group GmbH
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Datadog is praised for its reliability, minimal downtime, improved stability, and light resource usage, with quick resolution of issues.
Sentiment score
7.1
SCOM's stability has improved significantly, especially in newer versions like 2019, with proper configuration and resource allocation.
Datadog is very stable, as there hasn't been any downtime or issues since I've been here, and it's always on time.
Security Engineer at Invitation Homes
Datadog seems stable in my experience without any downtime or reliability issues.
Full Stack Developer at Townsquare Interactive
Datadog seems to be more stable, and I really want to have a complete demo before making a call to decide on this.
Enterprise solution architect at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
I have not seen many errors or frequent data loss because once we have installed the agent on the system and have the details, not much manual intervention is required.
Assistant Manager at SMS group GmbH
SCOM is a bit unstable lately, primarily due to a lack of resources.
Network Operations Center at Student Loans Company
 

Room For Improvement

Customers seek improved performance, simplified interface, predictable pricing, enhanced integration, and intuitive features in Datadog for better usability.
SCOM needs better dashboards, lower licensing costs, easier integration, improved reporting, enhanced support, and efficient alert management.
It would be great to see stronger AI-driven anomaly detection and predictive analytics to help identify potential issues before they impact performance.
Operations Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
We want to be able to customize the cost part, and we would appreciate more granular access control.
Service Manager at PwC
The documentation is adequate, but team members coming into a project could benefit from more guided, interactive tutorials, ideally leveraging real-world data.
Senior Software Engineer at Los Angeles Times Communications, LLC
I would like to see a software-as-a-service version in Azure to eliminate the need for on-premise infrastructure.
ICT System Administrator at College of Europe
SCOM is likely to be phased out in favor of more compatible tools like Icinga for application monitoring or when moving to cloud solutions like CloudWatch and Azure.
Network Operations Center at Student Loans Company
It would be beneficial to have a summary on one single dashboard, as there are many more possibilities available.
Assistant Manager at SMS group GmbH
 

Setup Cost

Datadog's pricing is flexible, influenced by organization size and usage, but monitoring is essential to manage potential extra costs.
SCOM pricing varies with agreements, often part of cost-effective Microsoft packages, though licensing can be complex initially.
The setup cost for Datadog is more than $100.
Senior Performance and Architecture Analyst at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Everybody wants the agent installed, but we only have so many dollars to spread across, so it's been difficult for me to prioritize who will benefit from Datadog at this time.
Applications Web Services Technical Engineer at Ace Hardware
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is really expensive.
Senior Site Reliability Engineer at a wholesaler/distributor with 5,001-10,000 employees
 

Valuable Features

Datadog delivers real-time monitoring and insights with intuitive UI, enhancing performance optimization, scalability, and cross-team collaboration.
SCOM efficiently monitors Microsoft environments with integration, customizable dashboards, real-time reporting, and automated alerts for proactive management.
Our architecture is written in several languages, and one area where Datadog particularly shines is in providing first-class support for a multitude of programming languages.
Senior Software Engineer at Los Angeles Times Communications, LLC
Having all that associated analytics helps me in troubleshooting by not having to bounce around to other tools, which saves me a lot of time.
Senior Site Reliability Engineer at a wholesaler/distributor with 5,001-10,000 employees
Datadog was able to find the alerts and trigger to notify our team in a very prompt manner before it got worse, allowing us to promptly adjust and remediate the situation in time.
Security Engineer at Invitation Homes
It assists me in detecting server downtime and delivers basic performance monitoring right out of the box.
Network Operations Center at Student Loans Company
The most valuable feature of SCOM is its monitoring capability, and we have integrated SCOM with Grafana, which is a dashboarding tool.
Assistant Manager at SMS group GmbH
SCOM integrates several systems and offers correlation features, like setting up everything around Active Directory or DNS.
ICT System Administrator at College of Europe
 

Categories and Ranking

Datadog
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
3rd
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 (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
SCOM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
15th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
83
Ranking in other categories
Event Monitoring (5th)
 

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 SCOM is 1.4%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Datadog2.4%
SCOM1.4%
Other96.2%
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.
AK
Assistant Manager at SMS group GmbH
Have integrated effective monitoring and seamless alerting with improved visualization capabilities
The most valuable feature of SCOM is its monitoring capability, and we have integrated SCOM with Grafana, which is a dashboarding tool. We have implemented and integrated this to create dashboarding of the SCOM monitoring system for the database, SQL, and the Linux servers we have configured in SCOM. We have created separate dashboarding for it, and the monitoring and creating rules and monitors in the management servers and management packs that SCOM provides are very useful for us. The alerting mechanism of SCOM has benefited our operations because we have modified the thresholds as per our internal requirements. We have configured threshold modifications for the CPU, memory, and especially for disk space. For routine disk space usage on the system, we have provided a separate threshold configuration.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
 

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 Business16
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise54
 

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 do you like most about SCOM?
The tool helps to monitor Windows servers. It offers alerts from a central location.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SCOM?
I am not aware of the exact pricing as it is managed by my supervisor. As an academic institution, we receive substantial discounts.
What needs improvement with SCOM?
We believe that the dashboarding in SCOM needs to be improved or enhanced because it is not too expressive in reporting. We can work on deploying new ways of viewing things and modifying visualizat...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
System Center Operations Manager, SCOM 2012
 

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
Dialog Telekom
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. SCOM and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.