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.
$18
per month per host
OpenNMS Meridian
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
OpenNMS Meridian is a scalable open source network management platform with network traffic analysis, network discovery, alerting, and monitoring. It's presented as a solution to monitor enterprise network performance and ensure the availability and performance of critical network services.
$42,000
per year
Pricing
Datadog
OpenNMS Meridian
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
Essential
$42,000
per year Up to 2 Meridian and cores Up to 25 Minions
Premier
$56,700
per year Up to 4 Meridian cores and Up to 100 Minions
Premier+
Custom
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Datadog
OpenNMS Meridian
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
Optional
Additional Details
Discount available for annual pricing. Multi-Year/Volume discounts available (500+ hosts/mo).
As per my experience, Datadog is best suited for complex, cloud-native environments where unified observability is critical, as it integrates seamlessly with AWS and Azure. Moreover, it provides deep visibility into latency and error rates. Datadog pricing is less appropriate for Startups with a tight budget and for organizations needing advanced incident management.
I would recommend all system administrators use some form of network monitoring if they are not already doing so, and I'd definitely recommend people consider OpenNMS if they're shopping around. Small businesses will benefit from the low-cost of entry (it's free!), whilst getting all the enterprise features. Larger businesses can benefit from paid support plans.
However, there's no getting around the fact that you will require some advanced networking and sysadmin knowledge to get the most out of OpenNMS, or at least, be prepared for a steep learning curve. If you don't have the resources to devote this time initially, you may struggle.
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.
I haven't quite figured out how to make topologies work yet, but I haven't spent a ton of time on it either.
We've also had a bit of trouble importing some MIBs, but that usually boiled down to working with the vendor to make sure we had the right MIBs and dependencies.
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.
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.
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.
OpenNMS's more attractive GUI and its price break were the main reasons our company chose to explore and use this product. However, it never managed to actually replace Nagios which had a much more established hold within the company. Perhaps we were over-monitoring, but our company claimed a $100k loss per hour of downtime.
Initial adoption required quite a lot of resources and time to get everything right. Totally worth it for us; just be prepared for a gradual process that will get better and better with time.
Once setup and running smoothly, it provides us with all the reporting we could hope for, at near zero cost.
With OpenNMS, we're able to offer a much more reliable service to our customers, and spend a lot less time dealing with issues.
