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.
"I think the performance and interface are the most important features."
"This is a stable product and we definitely plan to continue using it in the future."
"The transaction snapshots let you find out where the application broke; it pinpoints where in the call stack, and then how long it took to resolve."
"In AppDynamics, everywhere I go, there's some sort of grouping and aggregation function, or there's some sort of timeline that lets me zero in more quickly on the traces that I need. They go to more pains to aggregate and bubble the important ones to the top. That removes a lot of manual work."
"It has improved my organization because we are able to proactively and reactively look at performance issues."
"The business transaction that stands between multiple applications is proving to be most valuable."
"It is a stable solution."
"AppDynamics' best feature is automation - for example, when I add a note, it can understand the data automatically."
"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."
"It's great for monitoring services and applications."
"Instana is very fast to implement and deploy because the dashboards are automated and don't need configuration."
"The platform’s most valuable feature is the ability to monitor the performance of containers for request and response analysis."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Instana Dynamic APM is auto-instrumentation."
"The primary selling point of this product is its unparalleled transparency into the infrastructure."
"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."
"More native support for other hardware is needed because having to install various extensions and perform extra setup for different devices is really challenging, and not as easy or straightforward as it is in other products."
"I think I would like to see a better way to deploy and upgrade the machine agents that we use. Currently, we have to use SCCM, and that might just be our environment with the customer."
"Regarding Search Guard functionality, there is room for improvement."
"AppDynamics is new to the cloud and could improve its cloud services, they are following a monolithic monitoring approach."
"AppDynamics is agent-based, so some customers are reluctant to install the agents in all their production environments. It would be helpful if they had an agentless version. It covers applications on the server, but the solution is weak on the network side. The agent is not deployed on the network components, so it cannot provide complete information about issues on the network layer."
"It is stable, but the only downside is the licensing part."
"The overall performance of this solution could be improved. The hot-hot infrastructure features could also be improved."
"The QA and test environment need improvement."
"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 solution's monitoring is pretty weak and should be improved."
"New Relic has a better UI in terms of how it presents the data."
"The App Connect middleware does not integrate with or show corresponding sub nodes."
"Its SLI and SLA features need improvement in setting up alerts."
"The configuration of Instana Dynamic APM needs improvement because it requires quite a bit of work."
"We'd always like to see additional functionalities."
"The integration could be improved with more plugins or open API."
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.
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