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 has good stability."
"It integrates well with other solutions."
"Almost any kind of visualization is possible with Grafana and all dashboards are configurable."
"It is a stable, reliable product."
"We like the alert features."
"What I found most valuable in Grafana is that it has a lot of integrations and features that I need for data processing and visualization."
"Collaboration: Shares data and dashboards across teams."
"The most valuable thing was that it had a good visualization tool."
"With Instana, the interface and the UI are very simple to use."
"The platform’s most valuable feature is the ability to monitor the performance of containers for request and response analysis."
"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."
"Its GUI is really good and it easy to understand for non-technical users."
"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."
"Instana is very fast to implement and deploy because the dashboards are automated and don't need configuration."
"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."
"Visually, it's very good. It provides everything needed for dynamic detection, which is very useful."
"It's difficult to see the trends on the graph when the range is too long."
"Lacks event management which affects our DevOps people."
"We need different kinds of applications in our infrastructure to see information in Grafana."
"Grafana doesn't provide anything for reporting."
"The security needs to be improved, such as the capacity to add permissions on dashboards."
"If there was an issue on one node, we couldn't drill down and see all the issues on other nodes."
"I would like the ability to download my results into any format in order to share the information with my clients."
"The solution must provide tutorials and guides."
"Maybe log monitoring could be better."
"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."
"Its SLI and SLA features need improvement in setting up alerts."
"We'd always like to see additional functionalities."
"The solution's monitoring is pretty weak and should be improved."
"The App Connect middleware does not integrate with or show corresponding sub nodes."
"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."
"New Relic has a better UI in terms of how it presents the data."
Grafana is ranked 6th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 39 reviews while Instana Dynamic APM is ranked 23rd 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, Azure Monitor, Sentry, Dynatrace and Elastic Observability, whereas Instana Dynamic APM is most compared with Dynatrace, AppDynamics, New Relic, IBM Application Performance Management and Splunk Enterprise Security. See our Grafana vs. Instana Dynamic APM report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors.
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