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Datadog vs Viavi Observer Platform 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
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
210
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)
Viavi Observer Platform
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
98th
Average Rating
0.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Datadog is 2.4%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Viavi Observer Platform is 0.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog2.4%
Viavi Observer Platform0.3%
Other97.3%
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.
JeroenDubbelman - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Bitrate
The product is extremely valuable and provides a lot of functionalities and visibility to organizations
The score-based application performance ratings help the network team. Often, customers have a siloed environment for security, applications, and servers. The network team is always asked to do troubleshooting. Being able to know how well an application worked in the past and what's happening today is really helpful. If someone has a complaint and the network team says that the problem is not on their side, they must be able to demonstrate it accurately. The network team is often given the least budget and the least number of employees. So, they must be able to troubleshoot and pinpoint problems as fast as possible. If it’s a network issue, they must fix it. However, if it is a cloud problem, an ISP problem, or a problem within the server or application environment, they must be able to demonstrate it clearly. It is the real benefit they get from the solution. Some of our customers are financial institutions. They use the tool for traffic accounting, especially when they get charged by ISPs or carriers for the amount of traffic they are using. In South Africa, we have banks that pay the service providers to allow customers to use their banking apps for free. The bank pays for it, not the customers. So, they need to compare to ensure they are paying for what has been used. Viavi enables them to do that. It is pretty much the best there is in the world. There is nothing to beat it. The product is extremely valuable and provides a lot of functionalities. It's really impressive.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Datadog has positively impacted my organization by making finding and resolving issues a lot easier and efficient."
"Datadog has impacted our organization positively in a major way because not even just as a QA engineer having access to the real-time replay, but just as a team, all of us being able to access this data and see what parts of our system are causing the most errors or resulting in the most frustration with users."
"Datadog has significantly improved our organization’s visibility into system performance and application health, and the real-time dashboards and alerting capabilities have helped our teams detect issues faster, reduce downtime, and improve response times."
"The installation step is pretty straightforward."
"Datadog has positively impacted our organization by allowing us to look at things such as Cloud Spend and make sure our services are running at an optimal performance level."
"Datadog gave us the opportunity to have a single platform for observability."
"Datadog is a complete solution with easy-to-use templates and excellent scalability."
"Across CCM and the rest of Datadog, I like how sharable everything is."
"The score-based application performance ratings help the network team."
 

Cons

"I find the training great. That said, it is set for the LCD (lowest common denominator). Of course, this is very helpful to sell the product, yet, to really utilize the product, you need to get more detailed."
"The ease of implementation needs improvement."
"The correlation between the logs and the metrics needs improvement as most cases, we might use another logging tool (that is cheaper in cost) which we then have to link together."
"It can be overwhelming for new people as it has a lot of features."
"Datadog could improve the flexibility with AI and ML concepts."
"We would love to see a % consumed and alert us if we are over budget before getting an overage charge 20 days into the month."
"I believe there is room for improvement with this solution. It wasn't easy for me to get a quick understanding of what this tool offers us as opposed to the added tools of AWS."
"Datadog lacks a deeper application-level insight. Their competitors had eclipsed them in offering ET functionality that was important to us."
"The product must start using a bit more machine learning and AI, especially for security."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"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."
"This solution is budget friendly."
"Pricing and licensing are reasonable for what they give you. You get the first five hosts free, which is fun to play around with. Then it's about four dollars a month per host, which is very affordable for what you get out of it. We have a lot of hosts that we put a lot of custom metrics into, and every host gives you an allowance for the number of custom metrics."
"​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."
"The tool is very pricey."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Construction Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise47
Large Enterprise100
No data available
 

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 ...
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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
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