Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics vs. Datadog vs. ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer

Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics is well suited for network monitoring and starts off as learning how your day to day traffic flows amongst systems and assets. From there it can then pinpoint specific alerts that you have enabled to be monitored on your network. This gives us insight on any issues that may come up and how we can fix them. It also allows us to see what systems are consuming the most bandwidth and such from a big picture point of view.

Incentivized

Datadog may be better suited for teams that have a more out-of-the-box infrastructure, on the primary platforms Datadog supports. You may also have better results if you have a bigger team dedicated to devops and/or a bigger budget. We found that trying to adapt it to our use case (small team, .NET on AWS Fargate) wasn't feasible. We continually ran into roadblocks that required us to dig through documentation (and at times, having to figure out some documentation was wrong), go back and forth with support, and in my opinion, waste money on excessive and unintended usages due to opaque pricing models and inaccurate usage reports, as well as broken/non-functional rate sampling controls.

Incentivized

Identifying network traffic anomalies. Identifying applications, devices, or users that are utilizing high bandwidth. Capacity planning for network links and internet circuits. Detecting potential security threats or breaches. Network performance and troubleshooting. Reporting network utilization.

• Improve security and productivity
• Detect advanced threats and indicators of compromise

Incentivized

• The thing which Datadog does really well, one of them are its broad range of services integrations and features which makes it one step observability solution for all. We can monitor all types of our application, infrastructure, hosts, databases etc with Datadog.
• Its custom dashboard feature which helps us to visualize the data in a better way . It supports different types of charts through those charts we can create our dashboard more attractive.
• Its AI powered alerting capability though that we can easily identify the root cause and also it has a low noise alerting capability which means it correlated the similar type of issues.

Incentivized

• Analyze network traffic by breaking it down into conversations with the ability to look at ingress and egress traffic.
• Gives a quick view of overall performance.

Incentivized

• More integrations with other Cisco tools or 3rd party vendors
• Add description of NetFlow probe, so you know which device it's configured on without logging into the actual switch
• Updated UI

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Check Network
• Check Flows
• Traffic

Definitely will not revisit after our issues and, in my opinion, poor support.

Incentivized

Very simple and easy to learn UI

Incentivized

There are so many features that it can be hard to figure out where you need to go for your own use case. For example, RUM monitoring us buried in a "Digital Experience" sidebar setting when this is one of our key use cases that I sometimes struggle to find in the application. It appears that ECS + Fargate monitoring was recently released which is great because we had to build a lambda reporting solution for ephemeral task monitoring. But this new feature was never on my radar until I starting clicking around the application.

Incentivized

Easy to implement, it does not require much hardware for installation, it is very accurate in the process of discovering and analyzing network packets and traffic consumption, as well as its graphs and best practices to implement. On the other hand, we can keep track of network devices and identify security vulnerabilities.

Incentivized

Site loads smoothly without issues. Reports pull quickly as well. Overall no issues with this products performance for us

Incentivized

Quick and easy support. Response time to support tickets have always been very quick and level of knowledge has always been excellent.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The support is always on point, fast, reliable, and their employees go above and beyond to help when we need it. I have yet to call them on any product we use and not get the issue resolved in a fast and timely manner. Also, they are also very pleasant while on the phone and/or in teh email chain. Overall I just couldn't ask for better.

Incentivized

Documentation was difficult to work through, rollout was catastrophic (completely outage)

Incentivized

If anything Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics only compliments other Cisco tools. We run a Cisco security stack and each one of those products only enhance and better the other product. Ultimately enhancing and protecting your network at its fullest capabilities. Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics doesn't only stack up, but adds another layer of visibility to help your company out.

Incentivized

Our logs are very important, and Datadog manages them exceptionally well. We frequently use Datadog services for our investigations. Use case: Monitor your apps, infrastructure, APIs, and user experience.


Key features:


Logs, metrics, and APM (Application Performance Monitoring)


Real-time alerting and dashboards


Supports Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, and other integrations


RUM (Real User Monitoring) and Synthetics





✅ Best for backend, server, and distributed systems monitoring.

Incentivized

Each of these solutions does what they aim to do. Based off of cost and need, ManageEngine fit better with our organization. We already use multiple ManageEngine products so bundling was a no brainer.

Only have this deployed to one site, so scalability is good.

Incentivized

• Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics has helped us mitigate network security issues
• Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics has provided us with detailed reporting on what are needs are in regards to network stability
• UI is stale and could use an update

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Lot of positive impacts
• Low Budget
• Great results