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Datadog vs Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 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 Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
188
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (8th)
Splunk ITSI (IT Service Int...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
10th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
IT Alerting and Incident Management (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Datadog is 9.0%, down from 11.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) is 0.7%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

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.
Sunil K R - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps improve our incident response time, and our mean time to resolve, but visibility is limited
In my previous project, I successfully led the end-to-end deployment of a Splunk migration. The process went smoothly thanks in part to Splunk's professional services team. They conducted a thorough assessment, identified all our potential pain points, and developed a tailored solution and migration plan. This comprehensive approach ensured a seamless transition. Our core deployment team consisted of 5 internal members and two specialists from Splunk. Additionally, the project included a project manager and a product owner. We also benefited from the expertise of two professional service consultants and two representatives from the customer's side. An on-site admin architect further provided valuable technical support. Throughout the deployment process, we leveraged support from various resources whenever necessary. This included assistance with configuration changes, deployments, and other related tasks. We also collaborated effectively with our teammates to ensure a smooth and successful implementation.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The feature I've found most valuable is the log search feature."
"Monitors have also been very valuable when setting up our on-call processes. It makes it easy to set up and adjust alerting to keep our teams aware of anything going wrong."
"Datadog infrastructure monitoring has helped us identify health issues with our virtual machines, such as high load, CPU, and disk usage, as well as monitoring uptime and alerting when Kubernetes containers have a bad time staying up."
"Datadog's seamless integration with Slack and PagerDuty helped us to receive alerts right to the most common notification methods we use (our mobile devices and Slack)."
"I don't have to worry about upgrades with the AWS version."
"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."
"This spectrum of solutions has allowed us to track down bugs faster and more rapidly, which allows us to limit revenue lost during downtime."
"The RUM solution has improved our ability to triage faster and hand more capabilities to our customer support."
"The service analyzer view and automatic creation of incidents are valuable."
"Splunk ITSI offers a valuable visualization tree that allows us to map and analyze dependencies and co-dependency within our environment."
"The most valuable feature is event correlation, which ensures that only one ticket is generated per issue, eliminating duplicates and reducing noise from multiple alerts."
"The most valuable features are the service analyzer and Glass Tables."
"It's scalable and expands well."
"The most valuable feature of ITSI is the service KPIs. No other tool provides you with the same level of observability and enterprise security or the search and reporting applications."
"I particularly like the preview feature because it provides a prompt experience for impact analysis."
"Our mean time to detect is down to five minutes."
 

Cons

"Datadog's roadmap can be a bit unpredictable at times."
"The documentation leaves a lot to be desired for new users."
"Datadog does not have the feature where you can monitor external websites or check the SSL secure for websites."
"The sheer amount of products that are included can be overwhelming."
"Graph filters for logs need to be set manually which works well for JSON but not for unstructured logs."
"More helpful log search keywords/tips would be helpful in improving Datadog's log dashboard."
"We need a lot of modules since we collect all data logs from all operating systems."
"Deploying the agents is still very manual."
"Splunk ITSI should include ease of integration and more templating."
"ITSI currently lacks the capability for automated response, mitigation, and remediation."
"After upgrading Splunk ITSI from version 4.11 to 4.13, the analyzer stopped finding values for KPS and services."
"It would be good if an interface was included in the next release."
"Some of our customers occasionally require the development of the connectors when there are no native connectors so that we can develop in Python or for customer slash comments as well. If they could adjust that, it would be ideal."
"We also faced challenges relating to UI development."
"ITSI could benefit from a security model that would allow operations team members to get involved in model building, KPI implementation, and model maintenance, while maintaining appropriate segregation of duties."
"While Splunk has existing add-ons, they are unreliable and do not provide accurate results."
 

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."
"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."
"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 pricing came up a bit compared to their competitors. It is not that the price has risen, but that the competitors have gone down. They keep adding more features that I would have expected to be baked in at a more nominal price. I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the pricing, but not enough to jump ship."
"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."
"The solution is fairly priced but history and log storage can get costly depending on your needs."
"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"Splunk ITSI is a pay-per-use service that is priced fairly based on the amount of data we use."
"Splunk ITSI is expensive."
"The pricing of Splunk is a bit high."
"Splunk pricing is high."
"Pricing was pretty good, and it is possible to just add on the features we want."
"I wouldn't say there's been an issue with the solution's pricing because we went through the AWS marketplace and negotiated directly with Splunk."
"I know that it is expensive, but I do not think there is another solution that can do similar things for that price."
"It is interesting. I am not involved that much lately, but if I recall correctly, you license primarily on the volume of data that you are using in Splunk ITSI, but there is no way Splunk can ever check if that is true, so that is interesting. We are not doing it, but someone can pretend to just use 10%, and it would be super cheap. It is tricky, but it is more tricky for Splunk than for us."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
39%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

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 needs improvement with Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence)?
Currently, Glass tables in ITSI only display metrics related to KPIs. I proposed adding an option to show metrics related to entities. This would eliminate the need for custom SPL to achieve this f...
 

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
TransUnion, Cox Automotive, Carnival Cruises, Leidos, Econocom, National Ignition Factory, Entrust Datacard, Molina Healthcare, United States Census Bureau
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.