Datadog Review: A Solid Tool That’s Not Always the Right Fit

4.3/5 Stars It’s a big and flashy tool, but not necessarily practical

I’ve worked in network operations for a long time and have used Datadog in several environments—from midsize enterprises to hybrid cloud setups. It’s a capable monitoring platform, no question. But after years of use, I’ve come to think of it as a “great tool for big teams with big budgets,” rather than something that fits the realities of most IT departments.

Datadog excels in breadth. The integrations are endless—AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, serverless functions, databases, logs, and even user experience metrics. If it generates telemetry, Datadog can collect it. The dashboards are slick, and the alerting system is granular enough to build complex dependency maps.

But that power comes with a price: both in dollars and in the time it takes to configure and maintain.

In one organization, our Datadog bill doubled in a year simply because we added more monitored endpoints. Every new feature—logs, APM, synthetics—came with its own SKU. By the end of it, the cost model felt like we were being billed per button click. For a large company, maybe that’s fine. For a small IT shop trying to stretch its budget, it’s brutal.

Another thing: Datadog assumes you have time to manage it. Dashboards need constant tuning. Alerts need pruning. If you’re juggling desktop support, procurement, and security on top of network monitoring, Datadog can become another full-time job. Diagnostic isn’t handled automatically, and that’s really difficult.

That difference matters when you don’t have a full NOC team or a DevOps engineer dedicated to parsing data streams.

Datadog’s cloud-first design also shows its limits in mixed environments. I’ve run into plenty of cases where on-prem SNMP polling or edge-device monitoring was more cumbersome than it needed to be. For hybrid networks—especially those mixing old switches, firewalls, and industrial hardware—PathSolutions is simply faster to deploy and more stable day to day.

None of this is to say Datadog is bad. It’s a polished, enterprise-grade observability platform. But it’s not built for lean IT. It’s built for organizations that already have the staff to manage it.

If your team is five people or fewer, Datadog’s sophistication quickly turns into overhead. If it’s fifty or five hundred, consider it. But for most IT departments that need, reliable visibility, quick diagnosis, and a tool that doesn’t require constant babysitting, PathSolutions TotalView will give you more of what you actually use, and less of what you don’t.