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Datadog vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications 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 Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
1st
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
3rd
Ranking in Container Monitoring
2nd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
206
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (4th), Log Management (4th), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th)
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
17th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
15th
Ranking in Container Monitoring
5th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Datadog is 8.5%, down from 12.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.9%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Datadog8.5%
VMware Aria Operations for Applications1.9%
Other89.6%
Cloud 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.
ToniLindberg - PeerSpot reviewer
Troubleshooting capabilities have improved application monitoring and support engagement
I can see what happens end to end, which is pretty beneficial. The solution has troubleshooting capabilities, providing a direct connection to knowledge base articles from VMware Broadcom. When I encounter an error, I can search directly within the system to see what solutions have been employed by others. It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the APM."
"We enjoy the multistep API tests."
"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."
"I find the greatest feature is being able to search across logs from various microservices."
"The setup cost was minimal."
"Datadog has impacted our organization positively since we were previously using AppDynamics and then we switched to Datadog, which improved a lot in our alerting and monitoring in the infrastructure space and application space, allowing us to monitor business transactions and take proactive action before an end user reports it."
"The most valuable aspect is the APM which can monitor the metrics and latencies."
"We integrate our application logs. It is great to be able to tie our metrics and our traces together."
"The solution provides single-console management for multiple VMware environments and cloud integrations, whether hybrid, private, or public cloud."
"The solution is great for virtualization and preparing the infrastructure in Tanzu to test products. It's very fast and has good visibility."
"Tanzu itself, integrated with multiple solutions, bestows support and security upon a container platform, especially when it comes to managing open-source container platforms such as Kubernetes."
"People are very pleased with the implementation."
"VMware Aria Operations for Applications offers significant features such as real-time statistics, the ability to identify possible issues within the VM environment, and helpful heat maps."
"It significantly improves application performance management by offering recommendations for resource allocation to avoid wastage or overcommitment."
"VMware comes with a support team, and if you have trouble, you can easily create a ticket, and VMware will help you. Therefore, the best aspect is the support."
"The stability of Aria Operations for Applications has improved significantly over the years."
 

Cons

"I would also like to see an improvement in the server's data extraction times, as sometimes it can take up to ten minutes to download a report for a critical issue that is costing us money."
"One thing we have run into is that it is so easy to add monitoring that we turn on things without really understanding the costs."
"The hardest thing we experience is just training people on what to search for when identifying a problem in Datadog, and having some additional training that might be easily accessible would probably be a benefit."
"The error traceability is an area that can be improved."
"In my experience, Datadog is stable, though there's typically at least one or two incidents per week."
"It can have an artificial intelligence component. Even though I can seamlessly look at end-to-end security, it would be better to have alerts and notifications powered by an AI engine. I am not sure if they have an AI component. We have not reached out to them or looked at it, but this is something that I keep on talking about within our company in terms of features. Such a feature would be good to have, and it would further optimize my Security Ops team's abilities."
"Presently, the billing CSV reports provide insights into billing-related information yet are somewhat limited in functionality, typically offering reports with only three columns."
"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 solution could be expensive, which might be a limiting factor."
"An area for improvement would be more in-depth reporting, such as analyzing disk IO during business hours compared to after hours."
"The documentation and integration with Kubernetes could be improved."
"In the new version, I would love to see more prediction capabilities. It would be great if one could see the alerts get a little more enriched with information and become more human-friendly instead of the technical stuff that they put in there. I think those would be really awesome outcomes to get."
"They could make it more easy to plug-in data so that a nontechnical person will be able to use it, like accountants or finance people. That way they don't have to ask us."
"The return on investment is best suited for organizations that do not have the resources for a dedicated VM environment team. However, the cost of the product doesn't show significant benefits."
"The implementation is a long process that should be improved."
"I find that there could be improvements in the support service response time, as the urgency varies unless specified as Priority 2 or 1 cases."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"The tool is open-source."
"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"​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."
"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."
"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 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."
"I would rate the pricing as three out of five."
"Different locations require different setups. In your terms, around 300 to around 400K USD."
"The licensing costs are very high, particularly when you consider that we have to purchase a level 1 license for every integration, such as the load balancer, HAProxy, and the MSSP. And if you want to use vSAN, that's another license. Then, of course, Tanzu Observability has its own separate license."
"I don't have the details. In our case, there is a mixture in place. We have production usage, and we are also doing training for VMware. So, we also have a training instance. It is worth the money you would spend on it. That's because if you were to build all of this yourself by using some of the open source tools, then you would need a lot of time."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
7%
 

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 Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise10
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
The solution includes cost drivers that can be configured according to your environment. You can input server-wise, CPU-wise, storage, and memory costs per hour or day. Once cost drivers are provid...
What needs improvement with VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
The new version 8.18 has brought significant improvements. The main purpose of using this tool is having a single console to manage all entities. The cloud integration capabilities, including priva...
What is your primary use case for VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
I have been involved in several projects where I had to implement automation and monitoring alerting. I performed automation using VMware Aria Operations for Applications. There is an automation ta...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Tanzu Observability, Wavefront, Wavefront by VMware, VMware Tanzu Observability
 

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
1. Atlassian 2. Cisco 3. Databricks 4. DigitalOcean 5. Equinix 6. Fidelity Investments 7. Google 8. Hewlett Packard Enterprise 9. Honeywell 10. IBM 11. Intel 12. JetBlue Airways 13. LinkedIn 14. Lyft 15. Mastercard 16. Microsoft 17. MongoDB 18. Netflix 19. Nvidia 20. Oracle 21. PayPal 22. Pinterest 23. Qualcomm 24. Red Hat 25. Salesforce 26. SAP 27. Spotify 28. Square 29. TMobile 30. Twitter 31. Uber 32. VMware
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications and other solutions. Updated: October 2025.
872,706 professionals have used our research since 2012.