Datadog vs. SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Datadog
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Datadog is a monitoring service for IT, Dev and Ops teams who write and run applications at scale, and want to turn the massive amounts of data produced by their apps, tools and services into actionable insight.
$1.27
per month (billed annually) per host
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds Netflow Traffic Analyzer is a network monitoring tool within the broader SolarWinds ecosystem. It includes core traffic monitoring features, as well as customizable traffic reports and alerts.N/A
Pricing
DatadogSolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
Editions & Modules
Log Management
$1.27
per month (billed annually) per host
Infrastructure
$15.00
per month (billed annually) per host
Standard
$18
per month per host
Enterprise
$27
per month per host
DevSecOps Pro
$27
per month per host
APM
$31.00
per month (billed annually) per host
DevSecOps Enterprise
$41
per month per host
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DatadogSolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalOptional
Additional DetailsDiscount available for annual pricing. Multi-Year/Volume discounts available (500+ hosts/mo).
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DatadogSolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
Best Alternatives
DatadogSolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
Small Businesses
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Score 8.8 out of 10
Auvik
Auvik
Score 9.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic
Score 9.4 out of 10
InsightIDR
InsightIDR
Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
NetBrain Technologies
NetBrain Technologies
Score 9.2 out of 10
InsightIDR
InsightIDR
Score 9.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DatadogSolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.9
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DatadogSolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
Likelihood to Recommend
A one-stop solution for everything you need. Multiple functionalities are tailored to meet specific business needs. Logs are essential for any business, and Datadog manages logs effectively. Rum sessions are something new to me and have given us a new perspective on how to reverse engineer issues that we see for our customers.
Read full review
I would suggest this tool to any user that has to monitor multiple sites and locations where bandwidth monitoring can be a labor. This software works really well for central monitoring of multiple sites and services where having a technician onsite isn't feasible. I really like the reporting, though, and would recommend this for someone wanting to keep an eye on bandwidth usage for replication of data across sites.
Read full review
Pros
  • Create Dashboards as per application, environments, and Custom metrics in one panel.
  • Log aggregation, one-stop Application monitoring tools for the whole infrastructure.
  • Playbooks, SLA definition, success and error quotas, request visualizations.
  • DB monitoring, Serverless stack monitoring.
  • Alerting of Production incidents so we can quickly resolve the issues on time.
Read full review
  • The level of customization possible with Network Bandwidth Analyzer is very valuable. Rather than being stuck with a "one-size-fits-all" presentation, an administrator can easily create customized views, reports, and alerts so that users can have a more tailored view of the data provided by Network Bandwidth Analyzer. This has the effect of making the tool more attractive to the end user.
  • The NetFlow Traffic Analyzer piece of Network Bandwidth Analyzer provides the details on bandwidth usage on the network. More than knowing how much bandwidth is being used, one is provided with detailed information on how that bandwidth is being used. This provides invaluable information for capacity planning and even certain forensic tasks faced by the network engineer.
  • The ability to produce network maps provides an easy way to create an attractive and functional NOC/SOC view of the entire network. Both technician and the occasional passerby can quickly determine if there are issues to be addressed. The ability to customize a map with background images and custom icons and stencils can make these maps really pop.
Read full review
Cons
  • Alert windows cause lag in notifications (e.g. if the alert window is X errors in 1 hour, we won't get alerted until the end of the 1 hour range)
  • I would appreciate more supportive examples for how to filter and view metrics in the explorer
  • I would like a more clear interface for metrics that are missing in a time frame, rather than only showing tags/etc. for metrics that were collected within the currently viewed time frame
Read full review
  • The ability to intuitively and quickly serve up specified information up to a dashboard for general “public” consumption, that cycles through several pages of information.
  • The ability to intuitively set up alerting on bandwidth levels, instead of having to dig through all types of alerts available to find the one needed.
  • Provide a pricing model based on different support levels: if I want only available update installations, don’t make me pay the same amount as those wanting full support.
Read full review
Usability
Datadog's user interface is quite friendly and easy to navigate. With menus clearly categorized, and ability to bookmark important dashboards, one can easily find what they're looking for. For dashboards, ability to move and resize visualizations and group them, is really helpful to organize dashboards. Automatic suggestions from Datadog for important visualizations based on the metrics and logs would provide another level of ease of use.
Read full review
As far as rating for usability is concerned I would give 10/10 as NTA is very easy to use. All you need to do is install that module and ask network Team to configure the Netflow towards Server IP. [The] rest is pre-configured and reports are pre-built. Moment you receive the flows from Network all you will have is information about traffic.
Read full review
Support Rating
The support team usually gets it right. We did have a rather complicate issue setting up monitoring on a domain controller. However, they are usually responsive and helpful over chat. The downside would be I don’t think they have any phone support. If that is important to you this might not be a good fit.
Read full review
It is useful for our Infrastructure team and also provides valuable insights to our application team regarding the traffic being sent from various endpoints. They can monitor their applications and ensure there are no network issues that may impact their application.
Read full review
Online Training
No answers on this topic
The training offered by SolarWinds is some of the best out there. They have several different videos that go into great detail from initial setup to advanced configurations. In addition to the view at your own pace video, they also have live training for customers that focus on a single product and you can ask questions with the folks who develop the software. I have had good success with their live sessions and getting questions answered.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
I selected Datadog because of its features and the wide range of integration support. As I already told it supports more that 600+ integrations which helps and organization to keep everything in a single place and also its AI feature which is reducing the time for root cause analysis. Its custom dashboards features which helps us to visualize the data in a more attractive way.
Read full review
SolarWinds NTA is hands down a superior product compared to Wireshark. However, when doing smaller isolated projects the affordability of Wireshark can not be overlooked. Wireshark does a great job of collecting data on ports and circuits. The advantage of SolarWinds NTA is the all encompassing collection of data and management of the multitude of devices. It is designed to do that, and does it very well.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • Saved us (time & money) from developing our own monitoring utilities that would pale in comparison
  • Alerts allow us to remedy issues before our customers even know about them
  • Tracking resource usage over time allows us to better plan for future needs, before it becomes a pain-point.
Read full review
  • Be prepared to answer lots of questions. When people see the data in NTA they are going to want to know why App A is talking to App B. Be ready to explain!
  • Hand the keys to the NTA kingdom to the network team. They will thank you. Everyone wants to have friends on the network team, right?
  • Be prepared to invest in some significant compute and storage performance to keep up with your NTA monitoring
  • Running the latest firmware for your network gear is (often) required to take advantage of all the flow-monitoring. You upgrade regularly, right??
Read full review
ScreenShots

Datadog Screenshots

Screenshot of the out-of-the-box and customizable monitoring dashboards.Screenshot of Datadog's collaboration features, where users can discuss issues in-context with production data, annotate changes and notify their teams, see who responded to that alert before, and discover what was done to fix it.Screenshot of where Datadog unifies traces, metrics, and logs—the three pillars of observability.Screenshot of some of Datadog's 400+ built-in integrations.Screenshot of Datadog's Service Map, which decomposes an application into all its component services and draws the observed dependencies between these services in real timeScreenshot of centralized log data, pulled from any source.