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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
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
209
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), 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)
Viavi Observer Platform
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
91st
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 March 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Datadog is 2.6%, down from 3.6% 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 (%)
Datadog2.6%
Viavi Observer Platform0.3%
Other97.1%
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

"The Datadog suite has allowed us to easily integrate log collection into all of our services and quickly detect unexpected changes in system data to declare security incidents."
"The product has offered increased visibility via logging APM, metrics, RUM, etc."
"With Datadog, we managed to get everyone on board into a single place and a single tool, providing teams with one spot where they can check everything related to monitoring, and enabling management and leadership to have an overview of all tools working together."
"Datadog has proven to be easy to set up and legible for both development and operational teams."
"Datadog has positively impacted my organization by shortening our time to resolve incidents because it's a central place for getting all the data that we need for troubleshooting."
"Since using Datadog, it has positively impacted our organization by giving us a one-stop shop for multiple applications and services that we can analyze in one spot."
"Going from viewing a metric to creating a monitor alerting on a metric is very easy."
"Session recordings have been the most valuable to me as it helps me gain insights into user behaviour at scale."
"The score-based application performance ratings help the network team."
 

Cons

"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."
"Auto instrumentation on tracing has not been very easy to find in the documentation."
"At times, it can be hard to generate metrics out of logs."
"I often have issues with the UI in my browser."
"I've only been using Datadog for a few months, and at first, it was frankly overwhelming in terms of both the UI and the available capabilities."
"It could use some additional features when working with metrics like Grafana or like New Relic has. Datadog does not use library technologies like Dynatrace does. Datadog has machine learning too, but it does not have this option in all layers of monitoring like infrastructure service process in applications."
"While the UI and search functionality are excellent, further improvement could be made in the querying of logs by offering more advanced templates or suggestions based on common use cases."
"To be very fair, I haven't had enough experience with Datadog to pick out improvements."
"The product must start using a bit more machine learning and AI, especially for security."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"​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."
"It is easy to run up a large bill, so become familiar with the cost of each piece of your bill and use the metrics they supply to estimate and monitor your bill."
"The solution is fairly priced but history and log storage can get costly depending on your needs."
"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."
"The price is better than some competing products."
"It has a module-based pricing model."
"This solution is budget friendly."
"Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."
"The tool is very pricey."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business81
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise99
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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Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Auvik, Datadog and others in Network Monitoring Software. Updated: March 2026.
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