We performed a comparison between Datadog and Instana Dynamic APM based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Datadog provides a range of valuable features such as customizable dashboards and reporting, efficient error reporting and log centralization, comprehensive logs and analysis, and seamless integration with development teams. It also offers excellent performance and infrastructure monitoring capabilities, and a SaaS model for easy access. Instana Dynamic APM is valued for its ability to generate real-time data, ensuring up-to-date insights into application behavior and user experience. Instana Dynamic APM also offers App Connect middleware, which visualizes flow and integration nodes, enhancing monitoring services and applications.
For Datadog, areas for improvement include user-friendly features, seamless integration, intuitive interfaces, simplified setup, and enhanced security measures. Instana Dynamic APM, potential improvements include increased integration with plugins or an open API, inclusion of synthetic monitoring and AI-based anomaly detection, and enhanced API monitoring and end-user experience monitoring.
Ease of Deployment: Based on user experiences, setting up Datadog is generally considered to be a relatively simple and straightforward process, taking anywhere from one hour to three days. Some users reported receiving assistance during the setup. On the other hand, the initial setup for Instana Dynamic APM is fast and uncomplicated, typically taking around 20 minutes. Once set up, no further maintenance is needed.
Service and Support: The availability and promptness of customer service for Datadog have received positive feedback. That said, there have been occasional instances of slow or unresponsive support in the Asia-Pacific region. The reviews for Instana Dynamic APM's customer service are varied, with some customers reporting positive experiences and others noting longer resolution times for issues.
Pricing: Users find the setup cost for Datadog's product to be costly and unclear, with some warnings about certain features becoming pricey rapidly. The pricing for Instana Dynamic APM is generally seen as fair and competitive, albeit slightly higher than other vendors. The licensing costs for Instana are deemed very reasonable, although there may be additional expenses for data transfer.
Comparison Results: Datadog is the preferred choice when comparing it to Instana Dynamic APM. Users appreciate Datadog's ease of use and setup, extensive dashboards and reporting capabilities, error reporting and log centralization features, and user-friendliness for development teams. They also value its wide range of integrations and flexibility in presenting data. Datadog stands out as a more comprehensive and flexible solution, offering a wider range of features and integrations.
"The fact that everything is under a single pane of glass is really valuable, as developers don't have to spend their time copying correlation IDs across tools to find what they need."
"It brings in observability, monitoring, and alerting capabilities - all of which we need to operate at scale."
"The ease of correcting these dashboards and widgets when needed is amazing."
"The web app has a real-time support chat window in which a support engineer is chatting with you within a minute."
"Datadog dashboards are pretty great."
"The integration into AWS is key as well as our software is currently bound to AWS."
"Datadog has helped us a ton by allowing us to set up a multitude of easily configurable alarms across our tech stack and infrastructure."
"The interface and the integrations make it so easy to connect to the cloud or to the on-premise environment."
"Its GUI is really good and it easy to understand for non-technical users."
"Instana is very fast to implement and deploy because the dashboards are automated and don't need configuration."
"The platform’s most valuable feature is the ability to monitor the performance of containers for request and response analysis."
"With Instana, the interface and the UI are very simple to use."
"The primary selling point of this product is its unparalleled transparency into the infrastructure."
"It's great for monitoring services and applications."
"It is a stable solution."
"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."
"The product could be improved by providing remote control to agents, enabling them to execute automation and collections without requiring another automation tool or integration."
"The documentation leaves a lot to be desired for new users."
"Datadog is so feature-rich that it is often hard to onboard new folks and tough to decide where to invest time."
"It could probably be a little bit of a better user experience."
"There is occasional UI slowness and bugs."
"We'd like Datadog to make the log storage cheaper."
"I want to applaud the efforts in making the UI extremely usable and approachable. My suggestion would be to take another look at how the menu structure is put together, however. Even after using the platform mostly every day for months, I still find myself trying to find a service or feature in the menus."
"I would like better navigability across pages."
"The integration could be improved with more plugins or open API."
"We'd always like to see additional functionalities."
"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."
"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."
"New Relic has a better UI in terms of how it presents the data."
"Maybe log monitoring could be better."
"While it is already quite good, there is room for improvement in terms of providing better functionality"
"The solution's monitoring is pretty weak and should be improved."
Datadog is ranked 1st in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 137 reviews while Instana Dynamic APM is ranked 21st in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 12 reviews. Datadog is rated 8.6, while Instana Dynamic APM is rated 7.4. The top reviewer of Datadog writes "Very good RUM, synthetics, and infrastructure host maps". 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". Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, New Relic, AWS X-Ray and Elastic Observability, whereas Instana Dynamic APM is most compared with Dynatrace, AppDynamics, New Relic, Elastic Observability and Azure Monitor. See our Datadog vs. Instana Dynamic APM report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors.
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