No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Azure Monitor vs Instana Dynamic APM comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Azure Monitor
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
15th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Monitoring Software (9th)
Instana Dynamic APM
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
50th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Azure Monitor is 1.9%, down from 5.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Instana Dynamic APM is 0.9%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Azure Monitor1.9%
Instana Dynamic APM0.9%
Other97.2%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Andy Rabern - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a outsourcing company with 201-500 employees
Telemetry insights have improved how I track user behavior and application performance daily
I feel Azure Monitor does a fair job. I do feel it is not a streaming service in my opinion. There are advantages to having stream messaging and logging on that level. But for what it is, I feel it does well. My perspective is more based on an Application Insights agent running on a service or an app service and sending the telemetry via the agent, and also doing the filtering of telemetry at the agent level so you are not having a ton of telemetry. I believe Azure Monitor does pretty much the same thing. I have also used tools such as New Relic, and New Relic is a much more robust tool, but that is a different product and you are going to pay for that. It is a different offering altogether. The subscription that we had at the time allowed for a couple gigabytes of telemetry during the month, and I believe that telemetry only lives for about two months. You have to experiment with it to see how much you want to pay. I was not really involved in the pricing. It was more along the lines of we were running up against our limits in terms of the amount of free telemetry or telemetry that we get with our subscription, and so we either needed to scale back or turn specific telemetry types off or do some more sampling. It is nice that those capabilities are there so that you can reduce the amount of telemetry. I cannot really speak to pricing but I do believe that it is somewhat reasonable for Azure Monitor. New Relic is pretty expensive, I believe.
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…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The upside to the solution is if you are working in a Microsoft or Azure environment, it makes things easier."
"Provides an overview and high-level information."
"It has improved the quality of application and through this we are able to analyze application performance, it gives alerts and insights of the application which helps us so much"
"We are an operation center so we use this solution mainly to monitor all of our clients' environments and to help them with technical issues."
"Azure Monitor's best features are its graphs and charts, the different visibility options, and reporting."
"Azure Monitor is very stable."
"Technical support is helpful."
"The most valuable feature is the universality of their functionalities in all Azure services, including, software solutions."
"Its GUI is really good and it easy to understand for non-technical users."
"It's a good tool to implement across the board if you can make it into your images or as part of your configuration management tool."
"The primary selling point of this product is its unparalleled transparency into the infrastructure."
"With Instana, the interface and the UI are very simple to use."
"We can easily perform root cause analysis using the tool."
"The most valuable feature of Instana Dynamic APM is auto-instrumentation."
"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."
 

Cons

"The cost skyrockets once you start using it, and there are complaints that the actual cost of the Kubernetes cluster was less than the cost they were incurring for Azure Monitor."
"Setting up this solution is complex. It's also missing the functionality of assigning alerts."
"Using Azure Monitor and Azure Arc separately to monitor different environments can be complicated."
"In my opinion, they should improve the overall user experience, especially when it comes to indexing and searching collective logs."
"The initial setup for Azure Monitor is quite complex."
"Currently, it seems it's complicated to get the correct information in terms of what to do and how things work."
"The default interface should be improved."
"We encounter some difficulties in monitoring the operating system on its own."
"Sometimes, the issue arises from user changes, such as adjusting firewall settings without proper consideration, leading to compatibility issues within the network monitoring."
"The configuration of Instana Dynamic APM needs improvement because it requires quite a bit of work."
"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."
"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."
"PHP was less stable. The coverage of Python versions was maybe less than it could be, but we didn't have any stability issues with Python, as such."
"New Relic has a better UI in terms of how it presents the data."
"The auto-remediation features must be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Azure Monitor is cheaper compared to other third-party monitoring tools."
"The solution is a pay-as-you-go consumption service and is the least expensive in the market."
"Azure Monitor is a competitively priced solution."
"The solution is expensive, but it is worth the price."
"Its cost depends on the ingestion of the logs. It could go anywhere. For an out-of-the-box platform such as FrameFlow, you pay pretty much a fixed price and you get what you get, whereas, with something like Azure Monitor, you pay by the ingestion charge, so you can have one client who pays hardly anything for the same alerts, and another client pays loads and loads."
"Azure Monitor is one of the more cost effective solutions on the market."
"The solution’s pricing depends on how much logs it collects."
"The Azure Insight is a little bit expensive."
"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."
"It's reasonably priced and manageable, especially for individuals who grasp the significance of application monitoring."
"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 solution is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"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."
"Instana Dynamic APM is more affordable for small and medium-sized companies compared to other vendors."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.
914,394 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business23
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise29
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

How does Splunk compare with Azure Monitor?
Splunk handles a high amount of data very well. We use Splunk to capture information and as an aggregator for monitoring information from different sources. Splunk is very good at alerting us if we...
What needs improvement with Azure Monitor?
I feel Azure Monitor does a fair job. I do feel it is not a streaming service in my opinion. There are advantages to having stream messaging and logging on that level. But for what it is, I feel it...
What is your primary use case for Azure Monitor?
I am a developer who uses Azure Monitor for telemetry of the applications that I work on. Application Insights is one of those tools, and I have also used other non-Azure products before. Currently...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rackspace, First Gas, Allscripts, ABB Group
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Monitor vs. Instana Dynamic APM and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
914,394 professionals have used our research since 2012.