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Datadog vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor 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 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)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
22nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.5
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (8th), Active Directory Management (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Datadog is 5.2%, down from 9.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.3%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog5.2%
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor1.3%
Other93.5%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

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.
NikhilKalwint - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Specialist at ServiceIO
Monitoring over a thousand systems has improved decision making and operational visibility
From an advantage perspective, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is comparatively cheaper from a commercial point of view. It is easy to install and configure, very user-friendly, and quick to get up and running, allowing you to see the early value adds in your organization. It is compatible with most technologies for monitoring with very few chances of incompatibility. Configuration also allows us to monitor all the technical parameters we are looking for, making it a very good experience for us. The alerting feature in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is a main advantage, as it alerts based on threshold breaches and can raise tickets to the ticketing system, send SMS, and email notifications, allowing engineers to work on those tickets to resolve issues and avoid further impact. The visibility into server health is a beneficial feature that I am utilizing. We widely use various application performance metrics in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor such as database monitoring and server monitoring, which are quite good enough for any monitoring solution. We utilize the customizable dashboards in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like that you can build out a dashboard pretty quickly. There are some things that come out of the box that you don't really need to do, which is great because they're default settings."
"The observability on offer is the most useful aspect of the product."
"APM and tracing are super useful, and when a production issue happens, it is super useful to see the related services and sense where the problem is."
"Our primary alerts, based on metrics and synthetic transactions, are the most used and relied upon for decreased MTTA/MTTR across all of our platforms. This is followed by deep log analysis that enables us to quickly and easily get to a preliminary root cause that someone on the infrastructure, platform or development teams can take and focus their attention on the precise target that Datadog revealed as the issue to be remediated."
"While my team is relatively new to Datadog, I already see immense value in switching over to Datadog as the primary APM and NPM tool."
"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."
"Datadog has positively impacted my organization by helping us make our web portals more efficient, and as we get the agent installed on more devices, it's really provided us visibility that we haven't had in my entire career with Ace Hardware."
"The most valuable aspects of the solution include log search to help triage specific problems that we get notified about (whether by alerts we have configured or users that have contacted us)."
"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."
"Manage Groups: The capability to group appropriate devices gives better visibility of sites, categories, or critical regions. The same can be used to represent a dashboard for higher management."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its real-time node monitoring and Help Desk's feedback."
"I have found the visibility into server health with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor very beneficial, which we use on a daily basis."
"This feature from Solarwinds SAM helped us to monitor and alert whenever the SSL cert is going to expire on the server to avoid any downtime of the services running on the server specially on ADFS platform where we have Video conference, Webex, Office 365 and single sign-on services."
"It is easy to install and configure, very user-friendly, and quick to get up and running, allowing you to see the early value adds in your organization."
"Identifying the problem statement is easy."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is the network devices' performance monitor is the best."
 

Cons

"In the past two years, there have been a couple of outages."
"The more tools that they can build that allow you to run AWX playbooks, or other similar fixes, would benefit clients greatly."
"The dashboard could be improved. It would be helpful to get a view of specific things that we need to monitor for our application."
"The error traceability is an area that can be improved."
"I'm not sure if Datadog can monitor K8s deployments in real-time. For instance, being able to see a deployment step by step visually. This would be helpful if there were any incidents during the deployment."
"I'd rate Datadog support four out of 10. It was primarily an issue with support in the Asia-Pacific region."
"The ease of implementation needs improvement."
"The on-premise version is very difficult to upgrade."
"One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules"
"The stability, flexibility, and ease of use could be improved."
"The templates could use improvement. Currently, they are quite complex. They should have drag-and-drop functionality instead. It would make it easier to use."
"Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included."
"The major concern in the product revolves around application performance monitoring since end-to-end application monitoring is not possible with the tool."
"I believe that some of the trends, environmental maps, and items like those found in Orion would be very beneficial."
"When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed."
"Application-based monitoring, such as monitoring within servers like Apache and IIS, has room for improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This solution is budget friendly."
"It has always scaled for us. Cost scales up too, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. It's reasonable for what they're providing."
"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."
"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."
"The tool is open-source."
"Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."
"The solution is fairly priced but history and log storage can get costly depending on your needs."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"Price can always be lower. It is neither on the expensive side nor on the cheap side. We have worked with them for a lot of years, so we get a discount due to the size of the installation."
"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."
"We are on an annual license to use the solution. The price of the solution is expensive. The price is based on a bunch of factors, such as the number of engines and elements."
"Nagios XI, WhatsUpGold, Uptime Software, PRTG, Manage Engine, and SpiceWorks are the other tools that have lower pricing and licensing costs. However, they can't compete with SolarWinds when it comes to the features and functionality that SolarWinds can provide."
"Understanding the counts of objects to monitor will determine the licensing need. In terms of pricing, it’s not cheap but it’s not expensive as larger vendors whose products don’t have all the features or integrations."
"The licenses start from USD 3000.00 and go up to USD 20,000.00 for the year. It's a perpetual license. Nothing is free in SolarWinds, anything that you need is an additional cost."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
"SAM is not per server so the pricing model can be deceiving. If you have an enterprise environment, you will quickly exceed your licensing quickly. You should know this before going in."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Educational Organization
12%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business81
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise99
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
 

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 needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There is definitely room for improvement besides simplifying its setup. As a non-technical person, I believe the dashboards could be improved. Everything we use appears on video walls, and we need ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
SolarWinds SAM
 

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
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,976 professionals have used our research since 2012.