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Datadog 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 August 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Datadog is 8.5%, down from 10.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Instana Dynamic APM is 1.0%, down from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk AppDynamics is 4.6%, down from 5.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer820579 - PeerSpot reviewer
Single pane of glass, easy to share dashboards, and good for monitoring
We've had some issues where we had Datadog automatically turned on in AWS regions that we weren't using, which incurred a small but steady cost that amounted to tens of thousands of dollars spent over a few weeks. I wish there was a global setting that lets an admin restrict which regions DD is turned on in as a default setup step. Sometimes, the APM service dashboard link isn't sharable. I click something in the service catalog, and on that service's APM default view, I try to share a link to that with a teammate, and they reach a blank or error screen. I wish there was more organization and detail in the suggestions when I use the query editor. I'm never quite sure when the autofill dropdown shows up if I'm seeing some custom tag or some default property, so I have to know exactly what I'm looking for in order to build a chart. It's hard to navigate and explore using the query autofill suggestions without knowing exactly what tag to look for. It's been a bit hard to understand how data gets sampled or how many data points a particular dashboard value is using. We've had questions over the RUM metrics that we see and we had to ask for help with how values are calculated, bin sizes, etc to get confidence in our data.
Muhammad Jawwad Hassan - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
Gyanesh Rahatekar - PeerSpot reviewer
Application performance management and error resolution improved with data-driven insights
Dynatrace has multiple functions compared to Splunk AppDynamics, so Splunk AppDynamics should add those functions, which are not available as of now. Dynatrace has a universal agent that collects all information related to their CI, and if one CI has multiple languages, then there is no need to instrument multiple agents. However, Splunk AppDynamics requires multiple agents; if I have one server with multiple applications in different languages, then I need to instrument different agents for each application. Splunk AppDynamics should work with Dynatrace with one single universal agent that works with all application languages, eliminating the need for multiple implementations.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We also use APM and metrics to view the status of our Pub/Sub topics and queues, especially when dealing with undelivered messages."
"The visibility that it provides is valuable. It is helping in being proactive around incident management. It is helping us to be able to get more visibility into our customers' applications so that we can assist them at the application layer. We also provide them the infrastructure from an AWS standpoint. We are able to make sure that our customers are aware of certain critical things around the analytical piece of either the network or the application. We're able to call customers before they even know about the issue. From there, we can start putting together some change management processes and help them a bit."
"The most useful feature is the APM."
"The logging in general is one of my favorite features."
"The most valuable features are logging, the extensive set of integrations, and easy jumpstart."
"The flexibility to create notebooks and dashboards and fully customize them gives us a lot of power to track the exact services and endpoints we are working on."
"Monitors have also been very valuable when setting up our on-call processes. It makes it easy to set up and adjust alerting to keep our teams aware of anything going wrong."
"Across CCM and the rest of Datadog, I like how sharable everything is."
"The most valuable feature of Instana Dynamic APM is auto-instrumentation."
"It's great for monitoring services and applications."
"With Instana, the interface and the UI are very simple to use."
"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."
"Instana is very fast to implement and deploy because the dashboards are automated and don't need configuration."
"The primary selling point of this product is its unparalleled transparency into the infrastructure."
"Visually, it's very good. It provides everything needed for dynamic detection, which is very useful."
"The overall capabilities are the most valuable."
"The most valuable feature of AppDynamics is Proactive Monitoring and Alerting."
"The most valuable feature in AppDynamics is the identifying of the slow responses. Additionally, it is easy to use."
"It's made it easier to collaborate across teams; be able to have the same data immediately in front of you just by sharing a URL."
"Data monitoring is the most valuable feature."
"This solution not only provides answers but also provides sensor data. This allows us to quickly resolve issues that developers may take a long time to solve."
"The solution's most valuable feature is the response time from the end-to-end server."
"The solution is great for database monitoring. You don't have to install an agent on the database. You just install the server to a database agent. It's a good product for some database administration if you don't want to install an agent on the database for security."
"The release management capabilities are great."
 

Cons

"The ability to find what you are looking for when starting out could be improved."
"The wide range of products Datadog now offers can be a bit intimidating to developers."
"In some ways, the tool has a pretty steep learning curve. Discovering the various capabilities available, then learning how to utilize them for particular use cases can be challenging."
"Datadog needs more local Asia-Pacific support, and if they don't have a SaaS solution in Asia-Pacific, they should offer an on-prem version. I'm told that's not possible."
"More pre-configured "Monitor Alerts" would be helpful."
"It is very difficult to make the solutions fit perfectly for large organizations, especially in terms of high cardinality objects and multi-tenancy, where the data needs to be rolled up to a summarized level while maintaining its individual data granularity and identifiers."
"I find the training great. That said, it is set for the LCD (lowest common denominator). Of course, this is very helpful to sell the product, yet, to really utilize the product, you need to get more detailed."
"It would also be nice if we had more insight into our own usage of Datadog (agents and custom metrics). They provide a usage page which does help, but it is not in real-time."
"Maybe log monitoring could be better."
"The integration could be improved with more plugins or open API."
"Its SLI and SLA features need improvement in setting up alerts."
"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."
"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"
"We'd always like to see additional functionalities."
"The configuration is tricky and requires a lot of tools."
"The end-user experience is not really good because we can't catch all of the transactions. We only can catch the full stack of flow transactions, but I think that this is caused by the technology they use. If they will catch every transaction, it will cause a very big load on the performance of applications. The monitoring of all transactions needs improvement."
"At this time, we don't have much visibility on the virtual environment, monitoring, and all other things. We have visibility only for database monitoring, and we have noticed performance impact when deploying database agents on the database server. We got to know this from AppDynamics support also that we should not deploy database agents from the database server. When agents are deployed on the same server and the database is monitored from there, we are not getting database server metrics. Therefore, we don't have those insights, and sometimes, we struggle because of that. They can improve this functionality so that we do not have a performance impact, and we can deploy anywhere. This would help us a lot. In terms of end-user monitoring, currently, it is not working for us because there are some complexities. It is a little complicated, and it takes a little bit of time to understand where you need to make changes. It would be very helpful if they can provide some template designs for end-user monitoring. When our servers are running on VMs, we don't get many insights from the VM side. I don't know whether it is possible to have visibility beyond the database, server, and application and whether there are some features where we can deploy AppDynamics on VMs as well. Such functionality would give us more control over storage, VM, OS, and database. It will also provide complete visibility of our hardware and software."
"In the current version of AppDynamics, there is a correlated section, where we can see all servers’ performance along with application performance, but network performance is missing."
"Regarding Search Guard functionality, there is room for improvement."
"The initial setup is a bit complex."
"AppDynamics is a solution that requires extra learning and could be more user-friendly. Additionally, automated reports would helpful similar to have they have in Google Analytics."
"The major concern lies with reports, specifically their configurability. It's like, if I want to combine multiple reports and generate them all at once, that's not possible. Even though there's a setup for generating 25 reports, I wanted to group them all and generate them in one go, which isn't currently feasible. I have to manually run each report and set the time for it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."
"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"This solution is budget friendly."
"Pricing is somewhat affordable compared to other solutions but in order to really lower the costs of other products you need to plan very carefully your resources usage, otherwise, it can get expensive real quick."
"It is easy to run up a large bill, so become familiar with the cost of each piece of your bill and use the metrics they supply to estimate and monitor your bill."
"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"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."
"Instana Dynamic APM is more affordable for small and medium-sized companies compared to other vendors."
"The solution's pricing is comparable to other products."
"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."
"The pricing is $1,200 per year which is a bit high compared to other vendors."
"The tool is expensive."
"The pricing is quite comparable to similar solutions in the market. All these solutions at the moment are cheap, but it is like paying for insurance; you pay insurance to avoid major damage."
"AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring does have licensing cost associated with it."
"The pricing is very competitive."
"Because it is priced per JVM, the price can increase pretty fast, into the millions. We have had challenges because we had to justify the price to our clients, as well, when we are putting in certain tools."
"The solution is highly expensive"
"We have a license-based solution. That means you need a license for each server you monitor."
"AppDynamics Server Monitoring is an expensive solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
29%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems,...
Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several time...
Which would you choose - Datadog or Dynatrace?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was t...
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...
APM tools for a Managed Service Provider - Dynatrace vs. AppDynamics vs. Aternity vs. Ruxit
Hi Avi! It's great to see your thorough approach to selecting an APM package for your MSP company. Considering your f...
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 ...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Adobe, Samsung, facebook, HP Cloud Services, Electronic Arts, salesforce, Stanford University, CiTRIX, Chef, zendesk, Hearst Magazines, Spotify, mercardo libre, Slashdot, Ziff Davis, PBS, MLS, The Motley Fool, Politico, Barneby's
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, New Relic and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: August 2025.
865,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.