Instana Dynamic APM vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 4, 2023

We performed a comparison between Instana Dynamic APM and VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

Features: Instana Dynamic APM is notable for its ability to generate real-time data and its quick implementation process. VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront is particularly praised for its easy deployment and seamless integration with other solutions. Instana offers comprehensive insights into application behavior and user experience, whereas VMware provides strong support for container platforms and offers valuable insights into application monitoring.

For example, Instana Dynamic APM could improve integration with additional plugins and an open API. It could also enhance synthetic monitoring and AI-based anomaly detection, API and end-user experience monitoring, and log monitoring. VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront requires enhancements in its billing model, customizable dashboards, cost predictability, documentation, and the initial setup process.

Service and Support: The customer service of Instana Dynamic APM varies, with some users being satisfied and others mentioning longer resolution times. Similarly, VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront has mixed feedback, with some users not needing support and others receiving prompt or satisfactory assistance.

Ease of Deployment: Instana Dynamic APM's initial setup is quick and straightforward, typically taking around 20 minutes. On the other hand, reviewers had mixed experiences with the VMware Tanzu setup process. Some found it to be fast and simple, while others found it to be more complicated and time-consuming, especially when dealing with cluster setups.

Pricing: Instana Dynamic APM offers a reasonably priced and competitive setup cost, although some users find the pricing slightly higher. In contrast, VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront is considered expensive, with high licensing costs and the need to purchase additional licenses for integrations and add-ons.

ROI: Instana Dynamic APM has proven to be a profitable investment, whereas there is no available data regarding the return on investment for VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront.

Comparison Results: Instana Dynamic APM outperforms VMware Tanzu according to user feedback. Users appreciate Instana's quick and simple setup, immediate data generation, intuitive interface, and extensive monitoring features. The pricing is also deemed reasonable.

To learn more, read our detailed Instana Dynamic APM vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications Report (Updated: March 2024).
763,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The primary selling point of this product is its unparalleled transparency into the infrastructure.""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 most valuable feature of Instana Dynamic APM is auto-instrumentation.""With Instana, the interface and the UI are very simple to use.""The overall capabilities are the most valuable.""It is a stable solution.""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.""Its GUI is really good and it easy to understand for non-technical users."

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"For us, the ease of deployment in combination with TMZ was the most important part because we don't have to manually deploy a complex monitoring solution. We can more or less do that with the click of a button, and we are not dependent on the developers to provide us with all the necessary features and functions to make that work. We can just deploy it on a workload cluster and monitor at least a good part of the workload. If we want to go into detail, we clearly need to make changes, but for a good part of application monitoring, it gives us good insights.""The solution is great for virtualization and preparing the infrastructure in Tanzu to test products. It's very fast and has good visibility.""The most valuable aspects of the solution are its ease of use and its ease of implementation.""People are very pleased with the implementation.""VMware comes with a support team, and if you have trouble, you can easily create a ticket, and VMware will help you. Therefore, the best aspect is the support.""No issues with stability.""The features I find most valuable is the querying and alerting capabilities.""Tanzu itself, integrated with multiple solutions, bestows support and security upon a container platform, especially when it comes to managing open-source container platforms such as Kubernetes."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications Pros →

Cons
"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.""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 App Connect middleware does not integrate with or show corresponding sub nodes.""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.""We'd always like to see additional functionalities."

More Instana Dynamic APM Cons →

"In the new version, I would love to see more prediction capabilities. It would be great if one could see the alerts get a little more enriched with information and become more human-friendly instead of the technical stuff that they put in there. I think those would be really awesome outcomes to get.""The initial setup should be easier and more seamless.""The main problem I have is that the license cost is very high.""They could make it more easy to plug-in data so that a nontechnical person will be able to use it, like accountants or finance people. That way they don't have to ask us.""It could use a URL document server. Everything in the market is moving towards automation and everybody's looking for the single click operations as well relational data locality.""The documentation and integration with Kubernetes could be improved.""Its billing model is consumption-based. I understand the consumption-based model, but it is not necessarily easy to estimate and guess how many points or how much we are going to consume on a specific application up until we get to that point. So, for us, it would be helpful to have more insights or predictability into what we can expect from a cost perspective if we are starting to use specific features. This can potentially also drive our consumption a bit more.""I would like to see integration with Kubernetes cluster and APIs so that you can manage the entire stack."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Pricing is quite competitive. Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic were all several times more expensive than Instana, both the on-prem and the SaaS versions. Price-wise they are a lot more competitive than anyone else out there."
  • "Its pricing isn't a big pain point. Its pricing seems to be better than some of the other competing products in the market, but they also have some of the features and functionalities that are better than Instana."
  • "The pricing is $1,200 per year which is a bit high compared to other vendors."
  • "The solution is less expensive than one of its competitors."
  • "It's reasonably priced and manageable, especially for individuals who grasp the significance of application monitoring."
  • "The solution's pricing is comparable to other products."
  • "Instana Dynamic APM is more affordable for small and medium-sized companies compared to other vendors."
  • More Instana Dynamic APM Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Different locations require different setups. In your terms, around 300 to around 400K USD."
  • "I don't have the details. In our case, there is a mixture in place. We have production usage, and we are also doing training for VMware. So, we also have a training instance. It is worth the money you would spend on it. That's because if you were to build all of this yourself by using some of the open source tools, then you would need a lot of time."
  • "The licensing costs are very high, particularly when you consider that we have to purchase a level 1 license for every integration, such as the load balancer, HAProxy, and the MSSP. And if you want to use vSAN, that's another license. Then, of course, Tanzu Observability has its own separate license."
  • "I would rate the pricing as three out of five."
  • More VMware Aria Operations for Applications Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The platform’s most valuable feature is the ability to monitor the performance of containers for request and response analysis.
    Top Answer:Instana Dynamic APM is more affordable for small and medium-sized companies compared to AppDynamics and Dynatrace.
    Top Answer:They could improve the product’s dashboards and provide more dashboard options. Additionally, the server and database monitoring needs enhancement compared to other vendors.
    Top Answer:VMware comes with a support team, and if you have trouble, you can easily create a ticket, and VMware will help you. Therefore, the best aspect is the support.
    Top Answer:It's hard to set up Tanzu clusters. It's hard to do a POC. Once you set up a customer's environment, you easily see the problems. The initial setup should be easier and more seamless.
    Ranking
    Views
    4,090
    Comparisons
    3,234
    Reviews
    6
    Average Words per Review
    328
    Rating
    8.0
    Views
    2,549
    Comparisons
    2,279
    Reviews
    4
    Average Words per Review
    549
    Rating
    8.3
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Tanzu Observability, Wavefront, Wavefront by VMware, VMware Tanzu Observability
    Learn More
    Overview

    Instana’s Enterprise Observability Platform, powered by automated Application Performance Monitoring, discovers and maps all services, infrastructure, and their inter-dependencies automatically. Instana ingests all observability metrics, traces each request, profiles every process, and updates application dependency maps in real-time to deliver the context and actionable feedback needed by Dev+Ops to optimize application performance, enable innovation, and mitigate risk to help them add value and efficiency to the pipeline. Learn more at https://instana.com.

    VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront is a powerful tool for monitoring and analyzing the performance and availability of applications and infrastructure in real-time. 

    With its comprehensive monitoring capabilities, visualizing and analyzing data becomes effortless. The real-time alerting system ensures timely issue resolution, while scalability and a user-friendly interface provide a seamless experience for smooth operations.

    Sample Customers
    Daxko Lifts Fitness Studios Through COVID Regulations with Quick Engineering PivotsAltissia Meets SLAs to Support Student DeadlinesImmocloud Unlocks Observability to Modernize Real EstateEnento Group Boosts Service Reliability with Real-Time Visibility into Application Performance Instana’s Observability for Amazon EKS Helps Yara Deliver Digital Farming Solutions
    1. Atlassian 2. Cisco 3. Databricks 4. DigitalOcean 5. Equinix 6. Fidelity Investments 7. Google 8. Hewlett Packard Enterprise 9. Honeywell 10. IBM 11. Intel 12. JetBlue Airways 13. LinkedIn 14. Lyft 15. Mastercard 16. Microsoft 17. MongoDB 18. Netflix 19. Nvidia 20. Oracle 21. PayPal 22. Pinterest 23. Qualcomm 24. Red Hat 25. Salesforce 26. SAP 27. Spotify 28. Square 29. TMobile 30. Twitter 31. Uber 32. VMware
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm24%
    Computer Software Company17%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Government7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Government6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise42%
    Large Enterprise33%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise69%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business30%
    Midsize Enterprise10%
    Large Enterprise60%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise68%
    Buyer's Guide
    Instana Dynamic APM vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Instana Dynamic APM vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    763,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Instana Dynamic APM is ranked 18th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 7 reviews while VMware Aria Operations for Applications is ranked 32nd in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 4 reviews. Instana Dynamic APM is rated 7.4, while VMware Aria Operations for Applications is rated 7.6. The top reviewer of Instana Dynamic APM writes "Empowering applications with real-time insights and seamless performance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Aria Operations for Applications writes "Easy to deploy, worth the money, and helpful for uptime monitoring and performance insights". Instana Dynamic APM is most compared with Dynatrace, AppDynamics, New Relic, Elastic Observability and IBM Application Performance Management, whereas VMware Aria Operations for Applications is most compared with Dynatrace, Grafana, Datadog, Zabbix and Prometheus. See our Instana Dynamic APM vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications 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.