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Datadog vs vRealize Network Insight comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

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
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
187
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (8th)
vRealize Network Insight
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
23rd
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
23rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Datadog is 5.7%, down from 7.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of vRealize Network Insight is 0.5%, down from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Kevin Palmer - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful log aggregation and management with helpful metrics aggregation
Datadog provides us value in three major ways: First, Datadog provides best-in-class functionality in many, if not all, of the products to which we subscribe (infrastructure, APM, log management, serverless, synthetics, real user monitoring, DB monitoring). In my experience with other tools that provide similar functionality, Datadog provides the largest feature set with the most flexibility and the best performance. Second, Datadog allows us to access all of those services in one place. Having to learn and manage only one tool for all of those purposes is a major benefit. Third, Datadog provides significant connectivity between those services so that we can view, summarize, organize, translate and correlate our data with maximum effect. Not needing to manually integrate them to draw lines between those pieces of information is a huge time savings for us.
NiteshKumar1 - PeerSpot reviewer
The tool's configuration is easy and artifacts are easily accessible through professional services and the web
The product is highly regarded, and many customers have been using it along with other VMware products like vSphere and VMware vCloud Usage Insight. However, recently, there's been a trend among customers, especially those using VMware for a considerable period, to explore the potential of migrating to the public cloud. The common concern among these customers is how the VMware products will perform in the public cloud environment. Migrating instances from VMware to different platforms is not easy, especially when dealing with many instances across multiple customers. Customers are keen to maintain the functionality of their existing VMware products but prefer to run them on the public cloud instead of on-premise servers. Our clients for vRealize Network Insight are enterprise businesses. I rate it a nine out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The interface and the integrations make it so easy to connect to the cloud or to the on-premise environment."
"Dashboards are the most valuable."
"Profiling has been made easier."
"The solution allows flexibility and heightened observability for presenting data, creating indicators, and setting service-level objectives."
"We have been impressed with the uptime and clean and light resource usage of the agents."
"The infrastructure monitoring capabilities are really valuable. You can just log on and see everything that is happening within an IT environment."
"The full stack of integrations made it easier to monitor the different technologies and platform providers, including Software as a Service providers, that otherwise would need a lot of work and customization to be able to see what is happening."
"The centralized pipeline tracking and error logging provide a comprehensive view of our development and deployment processes, making it much easier to identify and resolve issues quickly."
"The most valuable feature for us is that insight into what our network is really doing - it's a fairly complex network. Not having to go through thousands of lines of network configuration to find firewall ports that were open or closed, for various ports, was very valuable. It went out and found everything we need very quickly."
"The most valuable features are the monitoring and tracking. It's also intuitive and user-friendly. The screen looks exactly the same as the other appliances for VMware, so it's easy to navigate."
"If we deploy NSX it shows us how the workflow will flow in the organization, what the roadblocks are, and what we need to do to overcome those hurdles. When we run this product, it gives us reports which describe problems with physical switches. We work with the network team to get them all resolved."
"It allows you to see traffic that you couldn't otherwise see, which is traffic within your Layer 3-bounded network, meaning east-west traffic. It's hard to get that any other way."
"The solution helps reduce time to value, increase performance, provide deep visibility, and easily manage networks."
"It is user-friendly. It's pretty simple to deploy and to run. It gives you pretty easy-to-understand reports, very graphically intense, so you can visualize what's going on in your network."
"I find it user-friendly and intuitive. With the GUI interface that we do use on a regular basis, it's easy to navigate, it's easy to see, easy to query. We get reports. It's easy to use."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
 

Cons

"Datadog has a lot of features kind of cramped into one dashboard. It's quite hard to get around what feature does exactly what. There was a steep learning curve, trying to navigate through menus."
"Datadog is so feature-rich that it is often hard to onboard new folks and tough to decide where to invest time."
"We have found that some of the different options for filtering for logs ingestion, APM traces and span ingestion, and RUM sessions vs replay settings can be hard to discover and tough to determine how to adjust and tweak for both optimal performance and monitoring as well as for billing within the console."
"The product needs to have more enterprise approach to configuration."
"We'd like to see more advanced incident management capabilities integrated directly into the platform."
"I'd like to see better pricing and more integration in the next release."
"The parallel editing of the dashboards should not cause users to lose the work of another person."
"Datadog lacks a deeper application-level insight. Their competitors had eclipsed them in offering ET functionality that was important to us. That's why we stopped using it and switched to New Relic. Datadog's price is also high."
"The UI, even though once you get to know it, it's easier, still it's hard to figure out by yourself. You have to go read, watch videos. It has a lot of data on it. So that is an issue."
"vRNI needs more remediation where it hooks into NSX."
"If it had some kind of plugins with vSphere, more effective plugins with Horizon View or other VMWare products, if it had interconnectivity, I think it would be more effective than it is today."
"Since Broadcom acquired VMware, it has been experiencing challenges. Many sales processes are not well defined."
"There's enough information there, especially in the visualizations, but I would love to see this in a kiosk mode, where I could have a dashboard for interested stakeholders to see and appreciate what's going on. Then, moving on to a more practical level for our Help Desk, our operations team could benefit by seeing, in real-time, a visual view of the network."
"I would like to see application identification. That would be cool."
"The only real improvement they can make is to add more third-party vendors into the environment, mostly switch manufacturers, because it's really limited to Cisco equipment and there are a lot of companies out there other than Cisco."
"I would like to see more interoperability on the firewall and low balancer sides."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It has a module-based pricing model."
"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 solution is fairly priced but history and log storage can get costly depending on your needs."
"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
"We have spent less time investigating network flows, so it is absolutely cost-effective."
"I rate vRealize Network Insight's pricing a seven point five out of ten."
"It reduces costs. It takes something that may be challenging and makes it more usable and visual by being able to bring in tools, seeing what their impact is, such as microsegmentation and application rationalization, and seeing it quickly."
"They should include the product in NSX because it's important to have it for deployment."
"The solution has reduced the time that we spend on other products. For example, with NSX, we were able to quickly find things that we would normally spend days trying to figure out."
"It's an expensive product because we have a lot of nodes."
"vRealize Network Insight is expensive."
"It's a little expensive, but for what you're getting out of the product, you often see the trade-off. It depends on the type of licensing you have. It might be a little too pricey for some."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
27%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 vRealize Network Insight?
The tool's ease of configuration and use and the availability of information and artifacts through professional services and the web are key factors that customers find valuable.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for vRealize Network Insight?
Broadcom is known for increasing product prices, making them expensive compared to what people used to pay. I liken the subscription model to not truly owning what you pay for.
What needs improvement with vRealize Network Insight?
Right now, I do not see a specific area for improvement. My main concern is understanding the intentions of Broadcom, which has acquired VMware. Broadcom should improve by going back to what was wo...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Arkin
 

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
NTTi3, VCIX-NV, VMware Networking and Security Business Unit, Illumio, CompuNet
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. vRealize Network Insight and other solutions. Updated: May 2025.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.