We researched Solar Winds because it was already in use by our client. It did not have the future of deep-dive monitoring like the solution. 

We looked at Datadog. It's simple, like the other main tools. We chose Instana Dynamic APM mainly because of its functionality.

I use Dynatrace as well. In comparison, Instana Dynamic APM is more affordable.

We explored other options and even had discussions with a few of our customers who use competitive products such as Dynatrace and AppDynamics. The feedback from them has been mixed, not overwhelmingly positive or negative, but rather falls somewhere in the middle.

We didn't look at a lot of competitors because, honestly speaking, generally what we found after implementing this as part of managed DevOps, was that APM was not at the top of the priority list for a lot of people. That was at least true for the customers that we were serving in India. For many of them, APM as a concept was introduced to them by us. A lot of them did not have know-how regarding APM.

The people who were interested in APM would generally contact us and check out Instana with us. They came from larger organizations or multi-national corps, so they had experience with AppDynamics or SolarWinds, etc. They were mostly IT managers or somebody who was evaluating different products. But for our customers, it wasn't really a priority. Instana was probably the first APM for them, in many cases.

We also evaluated Dynatrace.

There is a difference in price between Dynatrace and Instana. The setup for Dynatrace requires a deep level of code in the table system, and Instana is only in Java.