No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Cisco Intersight vs Datadog comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
5.9
Cisco Intersight provides ROI by lowering staffing and operational costs through network consolidation and reduced manual tasks.
Sentiment score
6.4
Datadog improves efficiency by reducing response time, optimizing resources, enhancing reliability, and saving costs through better infrastructure monitoring.
It simplifies the onboarding of new hardware, reducing time spent on manual installations and configurations.
Systems Engineer at FNB South Africa
I have seen a return on investment, as we need fewer employees, and most of it can be done from one dashboard.
Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder at a computer software company with 1-10 employees
Previously we had thirteen contractors doing the monitoring for us, which is now reduced to only five.
IT Manager at Liberty Mutual Insurance
Datadog has delivered more than its value through reduced downtime, faster recovery, and infrastructure optimization.
Sr. Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
We have also seen fewer escalations for minor issues because alerts help us catch problems earlier, which indirectly reduces downtime and improves overall efficiency.
Network Security Consultant at NTT DATA
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.5
Cisco Intersight customer service is highly rated, though support quality varies due to regional differences and specific contracts.
Sentiment score
6.7
Datadog's customer service is generally reliable and efficient, with recent improvements noted, despite occasional delays and communication issues.
For complex issues, it's challenging to get the right engineer quickly unless you have a specific contract like CX.
Senior Network Architect at ocp tech
On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the customer support a ten.
Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder at a computer software company with 1-10 employees
I would rate the technical support by Cisco as an eight or nine, because Cisco TAC is one of the best TACs I work with.
Team Lead for Network & Security at Secure Services Mauritius Ltd
When I have additional questions, the ticket is updated with actual recommendations or suggestions pointing me in the correct direction.
Applications Web Services Technical Engineer at Ace Hardware
Overall, the entire Datadog comprehensive experience of support, onboarding, getting everything in there, and having a good line of feedback has been exceptional.
Systems Administrator at Townsquare Interactive
I've had a couple instances where I reached out to Datadog's support team, and they have been really super helpful and very kind, even reaching back out after resolving my issues to check if everything's going well.
Security Engineer at Invitation Homes
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Cisco Intersight provides efficient, seamless scalability, allowing remote management of complex environments with adaptable policies and high user ratings.
Sentiment score
7.5
Datadog excels in scalable performance and integration but requires careful ingestion cost management as environments grow.
I rate its scalability a ten out of ten due to its capability to manage multiple domains and automate service requests.
Systems Engineer at FNB South Africa
Scalability allows for creating server profiles quickly, mapping them to multiple servers, and removing them when scaling down.
Technical Marketing Engineer Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures at NetApp
Cisco Intersight scales straightforwardly with the growing needs of the organization.
Team Lead for Network & Security at Secure Services Mauritius Ltd
Datadog's scalability has been great as it has been able to grow with our needs.
IT Manager at Liberty Mutual Insurance
Since it is a SaaS platform, we did not have to worry about backend scaling.
Network Security Consultant at NTT DATA
We have not faced any major performance issues from the platform side; it handles increased metrics and monitoring loads smoothly.
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Cisco Intersight is mostly stable and reliable, with some challenges in upgrades and hardware-related performance issues.
Sentiment score
8.0
Datadog is praised for stability and reliability, with rare, quickly-resolved issues, especially during peak traffic periods.
After five years, if I don't have access to the Cisco Intersight portal, how do I manage my servers if I want to conduct some test environments?
Team Lead for Network & Security at Secure Services Mauritius Ltd
Some steps are not included in the official documentation, which can create challenges.
Senior Network Architect at ocp tech
It is always accessible online, secure, and allows access from any location, following strict authentication standards.
Systems Engineer at FNB South Africa
Metrics collection and alerting have been consistent in day-to-day use.
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
Datadog is very stable, as there hasn't been any downtime or issues since I've been here, and it's always on time.
Security Engineer at Invitation Homes
Datadog seems stable in my experience without any downtime or reliability issues.
Full Stack Developer at Townsquare Interactive
 

Room For Improvement

Cisco Intersight needs improved migration, integration, usability, automation, and cost-effectiveness, with emphasis on stability and on-premise features.
Datadog needs better alert management, cost control, data representation, API consistency, integration, security, automation, navigation, and educational resources.
For how Cisco Intersight can be improved, I focus on two points: visual policies, which I believe is the most important improvement, and the possibility to work with local labs in a local infrastructure.
Consultant at SOSNET
There is a significant issue regarding migration from UCS Manager into Intersight without formatting the Fabric Interconnects (FI), which is problematic in a production environment.
System Presale at Bezeq
It would be great to have a chat session mode AI so that when I am on standby and encountering issues, I could engage with it, much like ChatGPT.
Systems Engineer at FNB South Africa
It would be great to see stronger AI-driven anomaly detection and predictive analytics to help identify potential issues before they impact performance.
Operations Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
We want to be able to customize the cost part, and we would appreciate more granular access control.
Service Manager at PwC
Having more transparent and granular cost control features would make it easier to manage usage.
Network Security Consultant at NTT DATA
 

Setup Cost

Cisco Intersight offers competitive pricing with free and paid tiers, offset by high initial costs and complex pricing structures.
Datadog offers scalable, usage-based pricing but requires careful monitoring to manage escalating costs and optimize feature utilization.
The pricing is fair and reasonable, particularly for enterprises.
Systems Engineer at FNB South Africa
Cisco Intersight's license cost is very high compared to AWS and Azure solutions, which have lower initiation costs.
Technology Architect at University of Helsinki
The pricing is solid for what we get.
Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder at a computer software company with 1-10 employees
The setup cost for Datadog is more than $100.
Senior Performance and Architecture Analyst at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Pricing is mainly based on data ingestion, such as logs, metrics, and traces, and it can increase quickly if everything is enabled by default.
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
Everybody wants the agent installed, but we only have so many dollars to spread across, so it's been difficult for me to prioritize who will benefit from Datadog at this time.
Applications Web Services Technical Engineer at Ace Hardware
 

Valuable Features

Cisco Intersight enhances data center management through automation, integration, predictive analysis, and AI-driven insights, reducing manual work.
Datadog enhances operational efficiency with unified visibility, integration, customizable dashboards, and comprehensive monitoring across cloud platforms.
This solution has provided time savings and required fewer people to operate this tool, rather than direct cost savings.
Sr. Network Engineer at Saudi Business Machines - SBM
It provides visibility into other products and storage, and is beneficial for environments where Cisco and other vendors coexist, allowing full visibility of the entire infrastructure.
System Presale at Bezeq
It also provides predictive analysis, predicting data leaks and making it easy to scale up servers remotely without requiring physical interference.
Technology Architect at University of Helsinki
Our architecture is written in several languages, and one area where Datadog particularly shines is in providing first-class support for a multitude of programming languages.
Senior Software Engineer at Los Angeles Times Communications, LLC
Having all that associated analytics helps me in troubleshooting by not having to bounce around to other tools, which saves me a lot of time.
Senior Site Reliability Engineer at a wholesaler/distributor with 5,001-10,000 employees
Datadog was able to find the alerts and trigger to notify our team in a very prompt manner before it got worse, allowing us to promptly adjust and remediate the situation in time.
Security Engineer at Invitation Homes
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Intersight
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
10th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (5th)
Datadog
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (2nd), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th), AI Observability (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Cisco Intersight is 1.6%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 3.5%, down from 5.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog3.5%
Cisco Intersight1.6%
Other94.9%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

AS
Technical Marketing Engineer Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures at NetApp
Centralized policies have simplified hybrid operations and now support automated workflows
The challenge could be if there are any bugs. Most of the time, you may feel that the TCAM resources are getting full on the Nexus just because of some bug or the configuration is not supported. Or sometimes, if there are any vulnerabilities happening on the current running firmware, those are challenges we have. And if you talk about from the compute side, there were initial bugs such as a CPU throttle issue. Because of that, the chassis was not running in an optimum way. You may see performance issues during that time. For that, Cisco released a patch, and it got fixed. I think Cisco Intersight should allow more automation capabilities. It should be more open, and it should provide more automation capabilities. I think there is also a scope of making it a little bit simpler because a lot of policy and config sometimes becomes confusing for the user because it has a lot of config. Maybe they can do a little bit of simplification with Cisco Intersight.
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.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which IT Infrastructure Monitoring solutions are best for your needs.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business81
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise100
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cisco Intersight?
Regarding improvements for Cisco Intersight, I would say more third-party integration is needed. At the moment it does have a basic integration of Pure Storage, so I can add my Pure Storage if I ha...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Intersight?
My main use case for Cisco Intersight is to register our Cisco UCS servers and apply profiles to our servers with configurations, firmware deployment automatically, and install the operating system...
What advice do you have for others considering Cisco Intersight?
I would rate Cisco Intersight a nine out of ten. I give it a nine because personally, I think it is one of the best management tools ever. I have worked before with different server vendors and dif...
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 ...
 

Also Known As

Intersight
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

EXMAR, RapidScale
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Intersight vs. Datadog and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.