Instana Dynamic APM Archived Reviews and Pricing

Ashijit Pramanik

student at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Jan 4, 2019

Auto-discovery agents require little configuration and detect everything from host to service level, but reporting is lacking

What is our primary use case?

The reason we started looking for something like this was that we were providing managed services for our customers. My company was a hosting company. We had various stacks that we were maintaining for customers, including PHP, a lot of Java, Node.js, Python; all of the popular languages. It was hard for people to get into APM because, at least in India, New Relic, AppDynamics, and other APM tools were quite costly. So cost was one issue. A second issue was that we were using different tools for different stacks. Some Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools for a particular stack would… more »

Pros and Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."

"New Relic has a better UI in terms of how it presents the data."
"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."

What other advice do I have?

If you are somebody who is already well-versed with the APM world and who has tried out different tools, you will find Instana quite easy to use. There really wouldn't be a lot of things to learn about it. Go with the SaaS version of Instana and don't bother with the on-premise. Other than that, to configure whatever is being auto-detected by Instana, be sure to check the logs of the agent that is running. If you find anything that the agent is missing, that's stopping it from gathering all the data it can, fix that. If you're using SaaS you don't have worry about disk space. There isn't much…

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Instana Dynamic APM Overview

Instana Dynamic APM Archived Reviews (More than two years old)

What is our primary use case?

Pros and Cons

What other advice do I have?