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 most valuable feature of Datadog is its logs."
"We have found that we're able to get in and out of troubleshooting issues much more rapidly, which in turn, of course, enables us to spend more time on our products."
"The RUM solution has improved our ability to triage faster and hand more capabilities to our customer support."
"It has a high-level insight into the infrastructure model of the application and provides important detailed data on the host and metrics, which is the main concern of our customers."
"Datadog has helped us a ton by allowing us to set up a multitude of easily configurable alarms across our tech stack and infrastructure."
"Its integration definitely stands out. It provides seamless monitoring of all our systems, services, apps, and whatever else we secure and monitor. Visualizations have become simpler with dashboards. We are getting visibility into systems, services, and apps stack through a single pane of glass, which is good. We are able to put logs in context."
"It is easy to implement and scale applications with standardized visibility, monitoring and alerting"
"We have hundreds of microservices, and knowing how top-level requests weave throughout all of them is invaluable."
"The most valuable feature of Instana Dynamic APM is auto-instrumentation."
"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."
"Its GUI is really good and it easy to understand for non-technical users."
"With Instana, the interface and the UI are very simple to use."
"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."
"It's great for monitoring services and applications."
"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 is quite complex, and there are so many features that I either didn't know about or wasn't sure how to use."
"Datadog does not have the feature where you can monitor external websites or check the SSL secure for websites."
"It would be ideal if the product offered a bit more monitoring from our dashboard."
"Some of the interface is still confusing to use."
"For three to four months, we have been experiencing real-time delays. For example, if we're monitoring incoming traffic, the real-time status should be displayed up to a certain point. However, due to delays or issues with Datadog, the real-time data might only be updated at an earlier time. We are experiencing consistent delays in data updates from Datadog, with the most recent data often being delayed by about an hour. This issue has been ongoing for the past four months."
"Billing should be more transparent."
"I've only been using Datadog for a few months, and at first, it was frankly overwhelming in terms of both the UI and the available capabilities."
"When I started using it years ago, it had stability problems. I remember, specifically, we ran everything in Docker containers. There were some problems getting it into a Docker container with very specific memory limits."
"The solution's monitoring is pretty weak and should be improved."
"The integration could be improved with more plugins or open API."
"Its SLI and SLA features need improvement in setting up alerts."
"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."
"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."
"We'd always like to see additional functionalities."
"The App Connect middleware does not integrate with or show corresponding sub nodes."
"The configuration of Instana Dynamic APM needs improvement because it requires quite a bit of work."
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.
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.