Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Datadog VS Icinga

Compare Datadog VS Icinga and see what are their differences

Datadog logo Datadog

See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

Icinga logo Icinga

Icinga is a fork of Nagios and is backward compatible.
  • Datadog Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-05

Datadog is a monitoring and analytics platform for cloud-scale application infrastructure. Combining metrics from servers, databases, and applications, Datadog delivers sophisticated, actionable alerts, and provides real-time visibility of your entire infrastructure. Datadog includes 100+ vendor-supported, prebuilt integrations and monitors hundreds of thousands of hosts.

  • Icinga Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-23

Datadog features and specs

  • Comprehensive Monitoring
    Datadog offers a wide range of monitoring capabilities including infrastructure, application performance, log management, and user experience monitoring. This provides a unified view across the entire tech stack.
  • Integration Ecosystem
    With over 400 integrations available, Datadog can easily connect with virtually any service, application, and technology stack, making it highly versatile.
  • Scalability
    Datadog is designed to scale from small startups to large enterprises, providing functionalities that cater to varied sizes and complexities of operations.
  • Real-Time Data
    The platform provides real-time data and analytics, which is crucial for diagnosing and troubleshooting issues as they arise.
  • Alerting and Notifications
    Advanced alerting and notification features allow users to set up custom alerts based on metrics, enabling proactive problem resolution.
  • User-Friendly Interface
    The user interface is intuitive and easy to navigate, even for those who are not particularly technical, making it accessible to a broader range of users.
  • Security Features
    Datadog includes various security features such as compliance tracking, threat detection, and anomaly detection, enhancing overall security posture.

Possible disadvantages of Datadog

  • Cost
    Datadog can become quite expensive, especially as the volume of monitored data and the number of integrations increases. This can be a limiting factor for smaller businesses.
  • Complexity
    With its extensive feature set, Datadog can be overwhelming for new users, requiring a steep learning curve to master all functionalities.
  • Data Retention
    The default data retention period is often shorter than what some organizations require, leading to additional costs for longer retention.
  • Performance Overhead
    The extensive data collection and monitoring capabilities can add performance overhead to the monitored systems, potentially impacting their performance.
  • Customization Limitations
    While Datadog provides extensive dashboards and visualizations, some users find the customization options to be limited compared to other monitoring solutions.
  • Support
    Some users have reported that the customer support can be slow or insufficient at times, which could be a downside when facing critical issues.

Icinga features and specs

  • Scalability
    Icinga is highly scalable and can easily handle monitoring for large and complex infrastructures, making it suitable for both small businesses and large enterprises.
  • Customization
    It offers extensive customization options through its modular architecture, allowing users to add or modify functionalities according to their needs.
  • Open-source
    Icinga is open-source software, which means it’s free to use and has strong community support. You can also contribute to its development.
  • Multi-platform support
    Icinga supports multiple operating systems including Linux, Windows, and macOS, providing flexibility in deployment environments.
  • Advanced monitoring
    It offers advanced monitoring capabilities such as performance data collection, notifications, and automated actions.
  • Extensible
    Supports integration with various third-party tools and plugins, enhancing its functionality and allowing for seamless interoperation with other systems.
  • Robust API
    Includes a powerful REST API for managing configurations and retrieving data, which facilitates integration with other applications.

Possible disadvantages of Icinga

  • Complex setup
    The initial setup and configuration can be quite complex and time-consuming, which might be challenging for users without prior experience in network monitoring.
  • Learning curve
    Due to its extensive features and customization options, there is a steep learning curve associated with effectively utilizing all of Icinga’s capabilities.
  • Documentation
    While comprehensive, the documentation can sometimes be hard to navigate and may not cover advanced use cases in sufficient detail.
  • Resource Intensive
    Icinga can be resource-intensive, requiring significant system resources, especially when monitoring a large number of hosts and services.
  • Dependency on plugins
    Many features require additional plugins, which might necessitate deeper technical knowledge and effort to integrate and maintain.
  • Support
    Although there is a strong community, official support can be costly. Furthermore, community support may not always resolve complex issues promptly.

Datadog videos

Datadog Review & Walkthrough

More videos:

  • Review - DataDog: What it is and where its going
  • Review - Datadog: 2-Minute Tour

Icinga videos

Bernd Erk - Why favour Icinga over Nagios

More videos:

  • Review - Using The Icinga Linux Monitoring Wizard

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Datadog and Icinga)
Monitoring Tools
91 91%
9% 9
Log Management
90 90%
10% 10
Performance Monitoring
87 87%
13% 13
Website Monitoring
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Datadog and Icinga

Datadog Reviews

The 10 Best Nagios Alternatives in 2024 (Paid and Open-source)
10 Best Datadog Alternatives to Consider in 2023 Datadog is one of the most potent and versatile players on the market, but they have their fair share of downsides. The monitoring and observability space is quite competitive, so we will discuss 10 of the best Datadog alternatives and compare their pros and cons to determine which is better suited for your needs.
Source: betterstack.com
Top 10 Grafana Alternatives in 2024
While all Grafana alternatives do not offer pricing transparency, go for a flexible pricing structure that fits your budget. Tools like Datadog offer pricing based on data volume or monitoring scope, while Middleware offers a flexible pay-as-you-go pricing structure.
Source: middleware.io
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Open Source vs. Proprietary: Determine whether an open-source solution like SigNoz or a proprietary one like Datadog better aligns with your requirements and budget. Open-source tools often offer more customization and community support, while proprietary tools may provide more comprehensive out-of-the-box features and dedicated customer service. At SigNoz, we offer both...
Source: signoz.io
10 Best Grafana Alternatives [2023 Comparison]
Datadog is a massive tool that offers a lot of features and solutions, including log management. But before we dive too deep, please note that Datadog is expensive. It absolutely is not for anyone other than large-budgeted corporations. Just take a look at what people are saying on X.
Source: sematext.com
5 Best DevSecOps Tools in 2023
There are many platforms that can be utilized for monitoring and alerting. Some examples are New Relic, Datadog, AWS CloudWatch, Sentry, Dynatrace, and others. Again, these providers each have pros and cons related to pricing, offering, ad vendor lock-in. So research the options to see what may possibly be best for a given situation.

Icinga Reviews

11 Best Nagios Alternatives (Free & Open Source) in 2024
Icinga is an open-source app and a service monitoring tool. Icinga can report on the health of your IT environment. All alert dependencies are shown in the dashboard and sent via email, SMS, or mobile messaging apps.
Source: www.guru99.com
The Best Open Source Network Monitoring Tools in 2023
Description: Icinga is an open source network monitoring tool that measures network availability and performance. Through a web interface, your enterprise can observe hosts and applications across your entire network infrastructure. The tool is natively scalable and can easily be configured to work with every kind of device. There are also a handful of Icinga modules for...
10 Best Zabbix Alternatives
Icinga is a popular enterprise-grade open-source tool for IT infrastructure and application monitoring. It checks the availability of your network resources, notifies you of outages, and generates performance data for reporting. Icinga was originally created as a fork of the Nagios Core application in 2009. The goal is to improve upon the groundwork laid by Nagios, including...
10 Best Open Source Monitoring Software for IT Infrastructure
Icinga, which began as Nagios Fork in 2009, got freed from the constraints of a fork and crafted Icinga 2, which is faster, easier to configure, more comfortable to scale significantly better.
Source: geekflare.com
13 Best Nagios Alternatives for Networks, Servers, IT Systems Monitoring
Icinga2 started as a fork of Nagios and became an expansive network monitoring solution even for enterprise-grade needs.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Icinga should be more popular than Datadog. It has been mentiond 8 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Datadog mentions (5)

  • Send the logs of your Shuttle-powered backend to Datadog
    Ideally, if we had access to the underlying infrastructure, we could probably install the Datadog Agent and configure it to send our logs directly to Datadog, or even use AWS Lambda functions or Azure Event Hub + Azure Functions in case we were facing some specific cloud scenarios. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • I wanted a self hosted alternative to Atlassian status page so I build my own application !
    Currently supported : Datadog, Jenkins, DNS, HTTP. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Datadog on Kubernetes: Avoiding Common Pitfalls
    Datadog is a powerful monitoring and security platform that gives you visibility into end-to-end traces, application metrics, logs, and infrastructure. While Datadog has great documentation on their Kubernetes integration, we've observed that there's some missed nuance that leads to common pitfalls. - Source: dev.to / almost 4 years ago
  • Post-DockerCon spam
    .. Is to see you email address being silently distributed to every single company that I've watched a talk from. And now suddenly get several promotional spam emails per day from some 4-5 different domains like instana.com, datadoghq.com, snyk.io, cockroachlabs.com (some of them send even multiple emails per day!). Source: almost 4 years ago
  • Never write a UserService again
    We're commonly doing this with logging, using services such as Loggly or DataDog. We're using managed databases, be it on AWS, Heroku or database-vendor-specific solutions. We're storing binaries on S3. Externalising user authentication and authorization might be a good candidate as well. - Source: dev.to / about 4 years ago

Icinga mentions (8)

  • What do you use to visualize your topology?
    Two manually updated svg maps on nagvis that integrate with our icinga checks, one for the transport system nodes and one for the routers. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • SSLPing permanently goes out of service
    Might be a bit of an overkill if you just want to check the certificates, but I'm using Icinga (formerly known as Nagios) to keep track of all of the systems - including webpage certificates. Source: about 3 years ago
  • What "legacy" software are you still forced to use in 2022 that you wish would die?
    Some of it can be migrated rather easily to Icinga https://icinga.com/. Icinga forked from Nagios many years ago, they rewrote the engine and have done a nice WebUI. It is able to support e.g. Business branches using "satellites" that act as proxy to the main server/ server cluster. I was one of the two guys doing the setup for a company with multiple branch offices/ factories and during the time I was there it... Source: over 3 years ago
  • Is there any program that can alert you of a stalled Plex Server?
    Personally I run https://icinga.com/ (to all my services, including Plex) and it polls every 5sec and after 5 fails in a row it sends me an email. Source: over 3 years ago
  • Linux is dead, long-live Docker monoculture
    Fast forward 12 years and I have Icinga2 collectors in each datacenter using check_by_ssh to run check_systemd, all front-ended by Thruk. The TIG stack is something on my list of things to look into at some point, but with Dynatrace available to do all the fancy application monitoring, there's no rush. Source: over 3 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Datadog and Icinga, you can also consider the following products

Zabbix - Track, record, alert and visualize performance and availability of IT resources

Dynatrace - Cloud-based quality testing, performance monitoring and analytics for mobile apps and websites. Get started with Keynote today!

Nagios - Complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services

NewRelic - New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them.

LibreNMS - A fully featured network monitoring system that provides a wealth of features and device support.

AppDynamics - Get real-time insight from your apps using Application Performance Management—how they’re being used, how they’re performing, where they need help.