We performed a comparison between Grafana 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: Grafana is open source, flexible in integration, and has a strong community with helpful forums. While Instana has a user-friendly GUI and real-time data generation, it falls short in terms of integration and AI-based anomaly detection. Overall, Grafana is preferred for its wide range of features and scalability.
"Plugin: Connecting Grafana to multiple APIs of leading monitoring tools and alerting tools."
"The initial setup is straightforward with just a few clicks on the solution's cloud."
"The dashboards are very easy to work with."
"Collaboration: Shares data and dashboards across teams."
"Provides good dashboard visualization."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana is the ease to build dashboards from observability construction. Additionally, the page services and integration are good."
"The dashboards are the most valuable features."
"Compatibility with Prometheus databases and the Spring Boot application make it the first choice when moving toward an SRE model."
"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 detailing of our application behavior and user experience is most valuable. In case there is an issue, we typically use Instana to figure it out. We can drill down to the application and figure out what's going on and where the issue is."
"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 platform’s most valuable feature is the ability to monitor the performance of containers for request and response analysis."
"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."
"It's great for monitoring services and applications."
"Instana is very fast to implement and deploy because the dashboards are automated and don't need configuration."
"The primary selling point of this product is its unparalleled transparency into the infrastructure."
"One area for improvement in Grafana is that depending on your version, you have to pay for the features, making the license expensive. It would be great if the licensing model could be more flexible. In the next release of Grafana, I want cluster creation to be available, which would help in Grafana deployment and scaling. Currently, the scaling process for the solution is a bit complicated."
"There are some areas of network drives that are not showing as expected based on server usage."
"Grafana doesn't provide anything for reporting."
"We need different kinds of applications in our infrastructure to see information in Grafana."
"I would like the ability to download my results into any format in order to share the information with my clients."
"The solution should include online support."
"Its UI features to create charts can also be improved. Some features could have a link to the documentation."
"The solution has room for improvement with a better API to help automate the construction of the dashboards easier."
"The integration could be improved with more plugins or open API."
"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."
"The configuration of Instana Dynamic APM needs improvement because it requires quite a bit of work."
"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."
"Maybe log monitoring could be better."
"They could improve the product’s dashboards and provide more dashboard options."
"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."
Grafana is ranked 6th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 39 reviews while Instana Dynamic APM is ranked 21st in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 12 reviews. Grafana is rated 8.0, while Instana Dynamic APM is rated 7.4. The top reviewer of Grafana writes "Agent-free with great dashboards and an active community". 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". Grafana is most compared with New Relic, Sentry, Azure Monitor, Elastic Observability and Dynatrace, whereas Instana Dynamic APM is most compared with Dynatrace, AppDynamics, New Relic, Elastic Observability and Sentry. See our Grafana vs. Instana Dynamic APM report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors.
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