We performed a comparison between AppDynamics 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 is the preferred option over AppDynamics as it offers real-time data generation with a user-friendly GUI and detailed insights into application behavior and user experience. It also has the best SLI and SLA features and reasonable pricing. While AppDynamics has valuable features, it has a high learning curve and complex infrastructure and is considered an expensive solution. Instana Dynamic APM is deemed a more efficient and cost-effective solution overall.
"Technical support is helpful."
"Despite dozens of deployments across hundreds of applications- we have yet to see a case where AD is negatively impacting application execution or functionality."
"It has improved my organization because we are able to proactively and reactively look at performance issues."
"The features that I like best are the dashboard and Business Journey."
"The most valuable feature is the detailed statistics, like the consumer count, for the ActiveMQ server."
"The best features of AppDynamics would be the code application monitoring capabilities."
"From the performance management side, I like everything from business transaction work to tracking. On the database side, we can get a lot of insights from the database. On the server monitoring side, it helped us a lot to find out some of the issues on the VM side because VMs were creating a little trouble for us."
"It reduces the time to resolve issues and requires less manpower."
"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."
"Instana is very fast to implement and deploy because the dashboards are automated and don't need configuration."
"It's great for monitoring services and applications."
"The overall capabilities are the most valuable."
"It is a stable solution."
"The platform’s most valuable feature is the ability to monitor the performance of containers for request and response analysis."
"The most valuable feature of Instana Dynamic APM is auto-instrumentation."
"With Instana, the interface and the UI are very simple to use."
"It is stable, but the only downside is the licensing part."
"At this time, we don't have much visibility on the virtual environment, monitoring, and all other things. We have visibility only for database monitoring, and we have noticed performance impact when deploying database agents on the database server. We got to know this from AppDynamics support also that we should not deploy database agents from the database server. When agents are deployed on the same server and the database is monitored from there, we are not getting database server metrics. Therefore, we don't have those insights, and sometimes, we struggle because of that. They can improve this functionality so that we do not have a performance impact, and we can deploy anywhere. This would help us a lot. In terms of end-user monitoring, currently, it is not working for us because there are some complexities. It is a little complicated, and it takes a little bit of time to understand where you need to make changes. It would be very helpful if they can provide some template designs for end-user monitoring. When our servers are running on VMs, we don't get many insights from the VM side. I don't know whether it is possible to have visibility beyond the database, server, and application and whether there are some features where we can deploy AppDynamics on VMs as well. Such functionality would give us more control over storage, VM, OS, and database. It will also provide complete visibility of our hardware and software."
"The resolution time takes longer than expected."
"The AppDynamics installation process needs to be more straightforward. Deploying the product is also tricky."
"Regarding Search Guard functionality, there is room for improvement."
"We would love to see support for more types of agents in the mainframe world."
"I would like to see something that lets me set real dollar figures, not just to outages, but to the solutions as well... when I'm looking at problems and have found a problem that I know I need to address. I could flag it off and have AppDynamics estimate how long a person would have taken to find that without it. That would give me a lot of leverage for justifying the existence of APM, which I really need."
"The solution could be more user-friendly for diagnostic purposes. Anyone who is using the solution should be able to infer what that error is about, they should be able to troubleshoot it better."
"The integration could be improved with more plugins or open API."
"The solution's monitoring is pretty weak and should be improved."
"The configuration of Instana Dynamic APM needs improvement because it requires quite a bit of work."
"Maybe log monitoring could be better."
"Its SLI and SLA features need improvement in setting up alerts."
"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."
"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 App Connect middleware does not integrate with or show corresponding sub nodes."
AppDynamics is ranked 5th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 153 reviews while Instana Dynamic APM is ranked 20th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 12 reviews. AppDynamics is rated 8.2, while Instana Dynamic APM is rated 7.4. The top reviewer of AppDynamics writes "Very good real-time monitoring capabilities, deep problem diagnosis, and transaction mapping". 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". AppDynamics is most compared with Dynatrace, Elastic Observability, Datadog, Splunk Enterprise Security and Grafana, whereas Instana Dynamic APM is most compared with Dynatrace, New Relic, IBM Application Performance Management, Elastic Observability and Datadog. See our AppDynamics vs. Instana Dynamic APM report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors.
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