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.
"It excels in providing comprehensive details when there are downtimes or fluctuations, offering thorough reports."
"The integration between Loki and Tempo is valuable."
"The initial setup is straightforward with just a few clicks on the solution's cloud."
"The product's initial setup phase was very easy."
"This solution provides valuable insights into the health of our infrastructure in real time."
"Kubernetes could help us to better visualize the trend of our data by recording and displaying our history over a chosen duration, such as the last 30 days."
"Grafana is a very scalable product. It's a really good product."
"There are multiple kinds of models there to create dashboards, which is quite useful."
"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."
"The primary selling point of this product is its unparalleled transparency into the infrastructure."
"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."
"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."
"It is a stable solution."
"With Instana, the interface and the UI are very simple to use."
"Its interface could be more accessible."
"They should improve the functioning of its editing tool."
"The documentation or training provided by Grafana is limited compared to its competitors, like Splunk."
"I had issues with the solution's configuration part."
"The solution has room for improvement with a better API to help automate the construction of the dashboards easier."
"I find issues with Grafana. For example, I am unable to open some services there. Then, we have to open ten different tabs to get it fixed. And it's annoying when there's something going on; we want to check Grafana, and it throws four different errors."
"The main drawback is the necessity for endpoint monitoring."
"I have a problem with Grafana in the area of documentation."
"Maybe log monitoring could be better."
"While it is already quite good, there is room for improvement in terms of providing better functionality"
"They could improve the product’s dashboards and provide more dashboard options."
"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."
"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."
"The configuration of Instana Dynamic APM needs improvement because it requires quite a bit of work."
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.
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.