We performed a comparison between AppDynamics and Instana Dynamic APM based on real PeerSpot user reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Instana Dynamic APM is the preferred option over AppDynamics as it offers real-time data generation with a user-friendly GUI and detailed insights into application behavior and user experience. It also has the best SLI and SLA features and reasonable pricing. While AppDynamics has valuable features, it has a high learning curve and complex infrastructure and is considered an expensive solution. Instana Dynamic APM is deemed a more efficient and cost-effective solution overall.
"It's made it easier to collaborate across teams; be able to have the same data immediately in front of you just by sharing a URL."
"I like how the AppDynamics dashboard portrays the information flows. When a task is executed, various flows between different applications and databases happen in the background. The dashboard is intuitive and helps visualize the connections, the directions of the flow, and the information related to these specific sessions."
"We are able to correlate performance between tiers."
"The initial setup is simple."
"That visual representation’s been really good, also the overhead that AppDynamics creates is quite small. We've tried Dynatrace in the past. Some of the applications didn't work as well with Dynatrace."
"It is a good monitoring tool. Its stability is very good."
"The most valuable features of AppDynamics is the scalability and monitoring."
"Despite dozens of deployments across hundreds of applications- we have yet to see a case where AD is negatively impacting application execution or functionality."
"Its GUI is really good and it easy to understand for non-technical users."
"Sometimes it's able to provide a proper RCA on its own. It's able to correlate different events that occurred and that becomes like an RCA in itself."
"The primary selling point of this product is its unparalleled transparency into the infrastructure."
"The overall capabilities are the most valuable."
"With auto-discovery, we didn't need to consider much. We just installed the agent on the host and it was able to detect everything from the host level up to the service level, for whatever stack was installed, and that includes containers and dockers."
"The most valuable feature of Instana Dynamic APM is auto-instrumentation."
"If a key monitored value has crossed a threshold, it sends out an alert. And the solution is able to intelligently find out if something is beyond the range that it normally resides in."
"With Instana, the interface and the UI are very simple to use."
"AppDynamics is a solution that requires extra learning and could be more user-friendly. Additionally, automated reports would helpful similar to have they have in Google Analytics."
"The solution's user interface should be improved."
"The solution could be more user-friendly for diagnostic purposes. Anyone who is using the solution should be able to infer what that error is about, they should be able to troubleshoot it better."
"This solution is expensive."
"AppDynamics scaled well up to around 3,000 agents. The performance deteriorated after that, while Dynatrace could support more than 10,000 agents. We were surprised that AppDynamics' scalability is not so good."
"We constantly need to improve our alert mechanism because we get a lot of false-positive alerts. These are not real errors. In addition, for end-user monitoring, sometimes, we are not able to catch all user activities. Because of not being able to follow the user activity from the start to the end, we are missing out on the performance issues."
"In the current version of AppDynamics, there is a correlated section, where we can see all servers’ performance along with application performance, but network performance is missing."
"Their support should be improved. Clusters and monitoring can also be improved."
"The configuration of Instana Dynamic APM needs improvement because it requires quite a bit of work."
"The App Connect middleware does not integrate with or show corresponding sub nodes."
"Many managers, as well as our customers, used to ask for reports, such as "top X number of queries that are slow," or "top pages that have the highest number of issues." This is something that can be improved by Instana. Currently, they don't have that kind of reporting available out-of-the-box."
"I think that Instana should improve the university and the certification process, so the users can find experts in Instana with their certification module process."
"The solution's monitoring is pretty weak and should be improved."
"We should be able to go back to scenarios during or before the issue. There should be something like a history playback. Such a feature or functionality would be good."
"Maybe log monitoring could be better."
"While it is already quite good, there is room for improvement in terms of providing better functionality"
AppDynamics is ranked 5th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 155 reviews while Instana Dynamic APM is ranked 23rd in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 12 reviews. AppDynamics is rated 8.2, while Instana Dynamic APM is rated 7.4. The top reviewer of AppDynamics writes "Very good real-time monitoring capabilities, deep problem diagnosis, and transaction mapping". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Instana Dynamic APM writes "A really good GUI that is easy for non-technical users to understand". AppDynamics is most compared with Dynatrace, Elastic Observability, Datadog, Splunk Enterprise Security and Grafana, whereas Instana Dynamic APM is most compared with Dynatrace, New Relic, Elastic Observability, IBM Application Performance Management and Datadog. See our AppDynamics vs. Instana Dynamic APM report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors.
We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.