We performed a comparison between SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor 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 provides real-time data with one-second granularity, has a user-friendly GUI, and offers valuable App Connect middleware for visualizing the main flow and integration node, making it the preferred solution. Instana Dynamic APM also has a fast and easy initial setup process, and reasonable pricing, and has been reported to provide a positive ROI for businesses.
"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."
"The primary selling point of this product is its unparalleled transparency into the infrastructure."
"With Instana, the interface and the UI are very simple to use."
"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 overall capabilities are the most valuable."
"Visually, it's very good. It provides everything needed for dynamic detection, which is very useful."
"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."
"One of the most valuable features are the reports. They're pretty good. Also, the ease of installation and customization for the client is another feature that we value. SolarWinds has a lot of features but these are the ones I like the most. We also like that the KPIs have the ability to be preset."
"Monitoring the components on your devices with out of the box monitors or the ability to create new ones (SAM)"
"Manage Groups: The capability to group appropriate devices gives better visibility of sites, categories, or critical regions. The same can be used to represent a dashboard for higher management."
"It's good at monitoring system-specific things like ports, services."
"Solarwinds has an open database that allows you to do serious integrations. It doesn't matter which service desk you have, you can implement and integrate it with SolarWinds."
"SolarWinds is a very stable platform compared to others on the market."
"There are many valuable features, including the network configuration manager, and the network performance manager."
"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."
"New Relic has a better UI in terms of how it presents the data."
"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."
"Its SLI and SLA features need improvement in setting up alerts."
"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 integration could be improved with more plugins or open API."
"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."
"We'd always like to see additional functionalities."
"The stability, flexibility, and ease of use could be improved."
"It should also be easier to upgrade SolarWinds. AppDynamics is harder to deploy but easier to upgrade. So AppDynamics takes a lot of time and effort to install, but you can upgrade it in minutes. SolarWinds is the opposite. It's easy to deploy, but upgrades take forever. To date, nobody can complete it on time, so the production environment is sitting idle."
"I would like to see support for non-Windows or non-Microsoft domains, especially Apache and other non-Windows servers."
"It needs time-based functions for monitoring. Some things need to be polled on a specific schedule or only during a specific window."
"The tool's AppStack needs to improve in the storage monitoring part. It should also include an analytics and recommendation approach. If I have found a fault in a server or application, I would like to know what caused it and how do I recover from it."
"When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed."
"The templates could use improvement. Currently, they are quite complex. They should have drag-and-drop functionality instead. It would make it easier to use."
"I believe that some of the trends, environmental maps, and items like those found in Orion would be very beneficial."
More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Pricing and Cost Advice →
Instana Dynamic APM is ranked 21st in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 12 reviews while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is ranked 17th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 38 reviews. Instana Dynamic APM is rated 7.4, while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Instana Dynamic APM writes "A really good GUI that is easy for non-technical users to understand". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor writes "We use this product for base and application monitoring. ". Instana Dynamic APM is most compared with Dynatrace, AppDynamics, New Relic, Elastic Observability and IBM Application Performance Management, whereas SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is most compared with Azure Monitor, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Prometheus and Nagios XI. See our Instana Dynamic APM vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report.
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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.