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."
"It reduces the time to resolve issues and requires less manpower."
"Error analysis in the troubleshooting sections go straight to the point."
"The most valuable feature of AppDynamics is Proactive Monitoring and Alerting."
"Once you get past installation, AppDynamics is highly stable and we get good results."
"Capacity planning is, in my opinion, the most useful."
"The business transaction that stands between multiple applications is proving to be most valuable."
"The most valuable feature is the live reporting on the current health\performance of our application"
"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 platform’s most valuable feature is the ability to monitor the performance of containers for request and response analysis."
"Visually, it's very good. It provides everything needed for dynamic detection, which is very useful."
"The overall capabilities are the most valuable."
"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."
"Its GUI is really good and it easy to understand for non-technical users."
"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."
"I would like to see more artificial intelligence and machine learning brought in to monitor the statement and payment sum issues we have."
"AppDynamics should improve its ability to track all the transactions."
"The agent deployment could be simplified by, for example, adding a GUI."
"The worst part is that the AppDynamics SaaS Environment has a lot of downtimes, and AppDynamics, despite our efforts, does not give us any feedback on these downtimes/incidents."
"I would like them to change their business model for scalability to accommodate growing companies. The business model should be more flexible."
"The dashboard can be better. Also, the automated reports could be improved."
"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 GUI can be overwhelming at first to a novice Dev or Ops support person, and the possible root causes of an issue do not bubble up to the first screen you see."
"The solution's monitoring is pretty weak and should be improved."
"Its SLI and SLA features need improvement in setting up alerts."
"The App Connect middleware does not integrate with or show corresponding sub nodes."
"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 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."
"While it is already quite good, there is room for improvement in terms of providing better functionality"
"The integration could be improved with more plugins or open API."
"Maybe log monitoring could be better."
AppDynamics is ranked 5th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 24 reviews while Instana Dynamic APM is ranked 18th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 7 reviews. AppDynamics is rated 8.2, while Instana Dynamic APM is rated 7.4. The top reviewer of AppDynamics writes "Good tracing capabilities and helpful technical support but needs better analytics". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Instana Dynamic APM writes "Empowering applications with real-time insights and seamless performance". AppDynamics is most compared with Dynatrace, Elastic Observability, Datadog, Splunk Enterprise Security and ThousandEyes, whereas Instana Dynamic APM is most compared with Dynatrace, New Relic, Elastic Observability, IBM Application Performance Management 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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