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Datadog vs Icinga comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 19, 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
4th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
3rd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
206
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th)
Icinga
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
19th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
27th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
20th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Datadog is 3.1%, down from 3.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Icinga is 2.8%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Datadog3.1%
Icinga2.8%
Other94.1%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Dhroov Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Harrison Bulley - PeerSpot reviewer
A stable, scalable and cost-effective solution that helps with inbuilt scripts for easy modification
I think the software is quite good, but we have had problems with getting it to recognize certain areas and amend certain checks, where we needed so we would have to create backend scripts for those checks. Though, being open source, it has the support to create backend scripts, it would be better to have these scripts in-built.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 helped my organization improve a lot of response time because we get alerts the minute it happens, which is our only means to reduce incident response time."
"Integrating Datadog with other platforms has made our monitoring processes a bit easier. It's not super simple, but it's manageable."
"The RUM solution has improved our ability to triage faster and hand more capabilities to our customer support."
"The ability to create custom dashboards has been incredibly useful, allowing us to visualize key metrics and KPIs in a way that makes sense for different teams and stakeholders."
"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 solution's SaaS model is easy to manage and works well in single- or multi-cloud environments."
"I have found some of the most valuable features to be the way things all come together that gives us a point of view that is useful. The panel is very beautiful and customizable."
"Icinga has multiple automation and integration features. There is an API for everything and a web UI for configurations. The APIs enable you to automate tasks in Icinga. We can also use plugins to talk to the API. The Icinga Director talks to a database in the background, and you can import settings from the CMDB to all systems in Icinga."
"The value of Icinga is that it has hundreds of plugins, so it's really easy to monitor pretty much anything."
"This solution has a self-healing handler where if the service is down, it is automatically restarted."
"The best thing about the solution is how it highlights errors, the issues, and what needs my attention. The solution directs me to areas that I should look for first."
"The ability to customize scripts and build your own queries to request information from the infrastructure elements you want to monitor. This level of personalization and customization is highly appreciated."
"Macros and the ability to connect it to Google Maps are valuable features."
"The apply rules feature saves a lot of time."
"Icinga does the job and is fairly stable."
 

Cons

"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."
"In the past two years, there have been a couple of outages."
"Once Datadog has gained wide adoption, it can often be overwhelming to both know and understand where to go to find answers to questions."
"I've found that the documentation is lacking in certain regards."
"I found the solution to be stable, I did not experience any bugs or glitches. However, some of the managing team did."
"We have recently had a number of issues with stability and delays on logging, monitoring, metric evaluation, and alerts."
"One thing to improve would be making it easier to see common patterns across traces."
"Additional metrics should be included."
"Icinga is a complex solution that's hard to learn. It's a powerful product for monitoring, but new users will have a hard time figuring out what to do."
"The tool currently fails to provide notifications to users."
"The user interface should be improved."
"In general, the product does not look good. However, it does what it is supposed to do. So, the improvements should focus on usability and UI."
"I think the software is quite good, but we have had problems with getting it to recognize certain areas and amend certain checks, where we needed so we would have to create backend scripts for those checks. Though, being open source, it has the support to create backend scripts, it would be better to have these scripts in-built."
"Icinga’s automation could be improved."
"One of the areas that are frustrating is remote monitoring for more than one machine."
"The installation and configuration are very complex."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is open-source."
"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."
"It has a module-based pricing model."
"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."
"Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."
"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."
"This solution is budget friendly."
"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low."
"The product is inexpensive compared to other DBM products."
"The solution is free to use."
"We're using the free version of Icinga."
"Even though Icinga's financial cost is low, it is an expensive product regarding the resources required to maintain and operate it."
"The solution is cheap."
"This is an open-source solution with paid support."
"It's an open-source solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Educational Organization
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise94
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise7
 

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 Icinga?
The best thing about the solution is how it highlights errors, the issues, and what needs my attention. The solution directs me to areas that I should look for first.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Icinga?
It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low. If you want to include this product in the services you offer to your customers, the return on i...
What needs improvement with Icinga?
There is room for improvement in multi-tenancy. It's not perfect, not even really good. It's average, but it should be improved. For instance, multi-tenancy for monitoring the virtual infrastructur...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Icinga Cloud Monitoring
 

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
Puppet Labs, Audi, Spacex, Debian, Snapdeal, McGill, RIPE Network Coordination Centre
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Icinga and other solutions. Updated: October 2025.
872,098 professionals have used our research since 2012.