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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
6.9
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (1st), 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
100th
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 July 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Datadog is 2.4%, down from 3.3% 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

"The real-time data helps us make informed decisions and optimize our operations, ultimately enhancing our overall efficiency and performance."
"The most valuable features are logging, the extensive set of integrations, and easy jumpstart."
"Thanks to frequent concurrent deployments, the DataDog alerts monitors allow us quickly detect issues if anything occurs."
"One of the solution's greatest aspects is its overall simplicity; it is very easy to use and easier to handle than other brands we have access to."
"Dashboards and their versatility are among the most valuable features."
"Datadog has a lot of features to be able to drill down deep into the swath of logs that our platforms generate."
"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."
"The seamless integration between Datadog and hundreds of apps makes onboarding new products and teams a breeze."
"The score-based application performance ratings help the network team."
 

Cons

"One area where I was really looking for improvement was the CSPM product line. I had really wanted to have team-level visibility for findings, since the team managing the resources has much more context and ability to resolve the issue, as the service owner. However, this has been added to the announcement in a recent keynote."
"When I started using it years ago, it had stability problems. I remember, specifically, we ran everything in Docker containers. There were some problems getting it into a Docker container with very specific memory limits."
"The solution should provide alerts for cloud outages."
"The product needs to have more enterprise approach to configuration."
"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."
"There could be more easily identifiable documentation on how to find different things on the platform."
"Datadog could always lower the price!"
"Datadog can be improved by addressing billing and spend calculation methods, as it would be better if these were more straightforward."
"The product must start using a bit more machine learning and AI, especially for security."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"The price is better than some competing products."
"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."
"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 tool is very pricey."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise49
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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Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, SolarWinds, Datadog and others in Network Monitoring Software. Updated: June 2026.
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