Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Alluvio Aternity vs Instana Dynamic APM vs Splunk AppDynamics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Alluvio Aternity is 0.5%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Instana Dynamic APM is 1.1%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk AppDynamics is 3.7%, down from 5.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Splunk AppDynamics3.7%
Instana Dynamic APM1.1%
Alluvio Aternity0.5%
Other94.7%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2668014 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
Predictive analysis has improved IT performance evaluation and problem management
I am a senior program manager and consultant who has worked with numerous companies. I downloaded the report for personal knowledge and was comparing tech solutions, like Aternity and Alluvio Aternity. My work involves consulting organizations and enhancing my knowledge on product technology…
Muhammad Jawwad Hassan - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Consultant at Arcana Info
A really good GUI that is easy for non-technical users to understand
Our company uses the solution for one of our bank clients. We use App Connect middleware to monitor services and applications such as Docker, Kubernetes, MongoDB, and MS SQL Server. We also monitor the bottleneck for all servers.  We currently have 20 users at one of our branches. We plan to expand…
DK
Technology lead at Infosys
Has enabled us to detect issues instantly through alerts and monitor every service from a single dashboard
Splunk requires significantly more improvements compared to Splunk AppDynamics, specifically regarding the licensing aspect. Splunk renews licenses every six months, which is inconvenient. It would be better to have a one-year license to avoid needing to update keys constantly, which can only occur on weekends, making it a burdensome task. Although Splunk is better for certain use cases, Splunk AppDynamics is broader in functionality. Specifically, I want enhancements related to creating dashboards not only for logs or minor services but also for configuration levels, allowing us to check configurations immediately without manually opening the entire code when exceptions arise—a feature I wish to see improved in Splunk, although it may not be necessary for Splunk AppDynamics.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"As a financial institution, we have a lot of applications that are either written internally or bought from a vendor and customized for us. Having a tool that lets us monitor specific transactions in those applications allows us to focus on the transactions that are important to the business."
"It is useful for working out whether there are any issues in the network or between the endpoints. It is also useful for working out any performance issues. It has been useful for a lot of stuff around Teams. Our customers like to know what's happening with Teams when they call in. It is helpful for easily profiling users. It records all the applications that are being used for each user, and you can see what users are doing. It is very good in terms of performance. You don't have to wait forever to try and get reports or results. It is quite quick to get everything that you need out of the software."
"The data the solution provides is valuable to us; we can see the health of the machines, how they are performing, and what might be causing issues on a particular machine."
"Aternity's Digital Experience Management Quadrant (DEM-Q) has been a game changer for us. While knowing your own metrics is nice, if you don't know how you compare to others or what the numbers should be, then it doesn't tell you much. This solution puts that into context (if we are doing better than others or worse), which helps us prioritize where we want to focus and do improvements versus that's just how slow it's supposed to be. It's also great in communicating what we are doing and why we're doing it to our IT leadership teams, by saying, while we're pretty far behind others in certain categories, the time and changes for our prioritizations are justified."
"The most valuable thing that you get from Aternity is very broad visibility. You get visibility of your network, of your endpoints, of your software usage, your application performance, capacity, in one pane of glass. We had 20 to 30 IT tools, including application performance monitoring, network monitoring, security, endpoint detection, network protection, capacity management, service management — every kind of monitoring you can imagine. But Aternity was always the first place that I turned for anything, because you can see everything in it."
"The most useful function in Alluvio Aternity is that it allows the customer to easily track and get visibility of whether the application an end-user is accessing is performing well or not."
"The dashboards of this platform are the most valuable, especially the Desktop Health dashboard."
"The most valuable feature of Alluvio Aternity is the compiling and displaying of end-user data so that we can utilize it to troubleshoot proactively."
"With Instana, the interface and the UI are very simple to use."
"The primary selling point of this product is its unparalleled transparency into the infrastructure."
"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."
"It is user-friendly, but we encounter issues processing input and understanding the graphics, such as seeing a flatline without knowing the cause. When these problems occur, I have to contact my support team to address and fix them. Also, monitoring processing is good."
"Visually, it's very good. It provides everything needed for dynamic detection, which is very useful."
"We can easily perform root cause analysis using the tool."
"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."
"Provides good overall application performance and transaction errors."
"The features of Splunk AppDynamics that I appreciate most are the business processes."
"Being able to install it on-prem and monitor our on-prem infrastructure is important for us... Most of our infrastructure is on-prem. We have highly scalable systems and AppDynamics will help us monitor our load on-prem. Our systems range from simple to the most complex and it gives us the visibility across transactions, in one dashboard."
"Before we moved the code to AppDynamics, we had to compare the agile process and also had to make sure that they're following the standards."
"AppDynamics is scalable. They can monitor billions of transactions because they're not monitoring all transactions. They're monitoring samples. So, they can offer good monitoring for the huge sites."
"After we implemented this solution, we can easily determine the root cause of issues."
"It is used to test customer behavior on a website."
"We set up alerts recently so we can fix any issues more quickly in production."
 

Cons

"We are waiting for the GA release of their agent. I hope they can do better when they release their endpoint agents. Right now, we are not able to measure some applications, core applications, because it's relying on a specific version of the agent and that agent has not come out yet and there's no ETA. I would like to see them speed up time to market when they release agents."
"Aternity does provide performance numbers, the data. However, it doesn't tell you what you can do about it. It just presents the facts. How to interpret the data, and how to draw conclusions from a lot of the data, requires knowledge and experience. That's the part that I would hope Aternity can continue to explore and give us that kind of capability."
"The dashboards and navigatability of the platform could use improvement. It often takes five or six clicks to drill down to exactly what you want to see."
"Reliability: Issues interfering with the deployment and use of the product has made its use reduced in scope."
"When they moved from Version 8 to Version 9, the customers lost so much control of what they could do with the product."
"The licensing model doesn't suit the market we are in and has room for improvement."
"They've additionally added some great color coding, but they need to explain better and drive down further on the meanings of this workflow."
"The other place for improvement, as an on-prem, non-SaaS customer, is that the system administration and management in Aternity are very difficult. They've even told me that most of their support calls come in due to configuration and system administration on their on-prem. Their on-prem solution is not easy to use."
"The auto-remediation features must be improved."
"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 integration could be improved with more plugins or open API."
"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 solution's monitoring is pretty weak and should be improved."
"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."
"We constantly need to improve our alert mechanism because we get a lot of false-positive alerts. These are not real errors. In addition, for end-user monitoring, sometimes, we are not able to catch all user activities. Because of not being able to follow the user activity from the start to the end, we are missing out on the performance issues."
"There could log management features included in the product."
"Customization requires a few manual tweaks."
"The networking monitor function could be better, we are not getting many details from it."
"AppDynamics should improve its ability to track all the transactions."
"I would like to see more artificial intelligence and machine learning brought in to monitor the statement and payment sum issues we have."
"The downside is that it's a little costly."
"AppDynamics is new to the cloud and could improve its cloud services, they are following a monolithic monitoring approach."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its licensing cost is very low. That's one of the reasons why we have kept it for so long. We get more than a 70% discount on the maintenance licenses. Its cost is very low for us, but if you buy it new, it would be much more expensive at the retail price."
"The solution's price is pretty comparable to the industry."
"The price for Alluvio Aternity is favorable."
"It’s a little on the costly side, but if you license intelligently, accounting for your various hosts connecting in through VDI or terminal servers, you can make it well worth your money."
"It is definitely a premium solution; it is not an inexpensive product. We have to ensure that we are getting the most out of it in order to justify the cost. However, it is not cheap, especially when you want to install it on all your endpoints."
"If the scale of your monitoring will be to go everywhere in an organization, a site license is key."
"Regarding cost, compared to other solutions, Aternity is pretty low. It's definitely lower-cost than others that we looked at, like Nexthink."
"You have to purchase it for 12 months, which is an issue because a lot of our customers are on a per-user-per-month type billing. There are a few additional costs. A lot of customers only get the essential licenses, and then they get what they call the application add-ons on top. They have to pay depending on how many customers and applications they want to monitor."
"The solution's pricing is comparable to other products."
"The pricing is $1,200 per year which is a bit high compared to other vendors."
"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."
"It's reasonably priced and manageable, especially for individuals who grasp the significance of application monitoring."
"Instana Dynamic APM is more affordable for small and medium-sized companies compared to other vendors."
"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."
"The solution is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"We are looking forward to purchasing the solution on the AWS Marketplace."
"The pricing is very competitive."
"As compared to other applications, its price is moderate. Its price is neither very high nor very low."
"The license fee for Application Analytics is in the range of 2.5 million over three years, with extra fees for service contingencies."
"We find its pricing reasonable and competitive. After it was acquired by Cisco, we found it acceptable."
"AppDynamics Database Monitoring requires a license for database monitoring and other features, while Dynatrace provides monitoring and other features out of the box without additional costs. Sometimes this makes it more challenging to pitch AppDynamics Database Monitoring to customers, especially because you need to buy a separate license. As an implementer, I have yet to learn about the pricing for AppDynamics Database Monitoring. Pricing is taken care of by the sales team."
"The product’s licencing policy is competitive. However, properly identify and size your needs to get the best rate."
"AppDynamics is priced on the higher side."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.
881,757 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
22%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
25%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
6%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
25%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise32
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business55
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise195
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Aternity?
Riverbed is costly in the Indian market; I would rate the pricing for Alluvio Aternity as a higher price.
What needs improvement with Aternity?
In my opinion, Riverbed can make Alluvio Aternity better by having the same Aternity agent help in security, such as ...
What do you like most about Instana Dynamic APM?
The platform’s most valuable feature is the ability to monitor the performance of containers for request and response...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Instana Dynamic APM?
I rate the pricing a seven out of ten. There are no additional costs associated with the product.
What needs improvement with Instana Dynamic APM?
Sometimes, the issue arises from user changes, such as adjusting firewall settings without proper consideration, lead...
Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems,...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AppDynamics?
I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten. The solution is highly expensive. Our company pays for the solution on ...
 

Also Known As

Aternity, Workforce APM, Aternity Frontline, Riverbed SteelCenter Aternity
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Maersk, SwissRe, Travis Perkins, Michelin, National Instruments, Simmons & Simmons, Lighthouse Guild
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
Cisco, Sony, Nasdaq, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Edmunds.com, Puma, Fox News, DirecTV, Pizza Hut, T-Systems, Cornell University, OpenTable, BITMARCK, Green Mountain Power, Care.com, Overstock, Paddy Power, eHarmony, Kraft, The Motley Fool, The Container Store, and more See more customers
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: February 2026.
881,757 professionals have used our research since 2012.