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Datadog vs Instana Infrastructure Monitoring comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

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

Datadog
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
2nd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
187
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (3rd), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (8th)
Instana Infrastructure Moni...
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
32nd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
24th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Datadog is 5.7%, down from 7.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Instana Infrastructure Monitoring is 0.5%, down from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Kevin Palmer - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful log aggregation and management with helpful metrics aggregation
Datadog provides us value in three major ways: First, Datadog provides best-in-class functionality in many, if not all, of the products to which we subscribe (infrastructure, APM, log management, serverless, synthetics, real user monitoring, DB monitoring). In my experience with other tools that provide similar functionality, Datadog provides the largest feature set with the most flexibility and the best performance. Second, Datadog allows us to access all of those services in one place. Having to learn and manage only one tool for all of those purposes is a major benefit. Third, Datadog provides significant connectivity between those services so that we can view, summarize, organize, translate and correlate our data with maximum effect. Not needing to manually integrate them to draw lines between those pieces of information is a huge time savings for us.
Hakimuddin Ronaque - PeerSpot reviewer
Has the capability to automatically integrate with a large number of products
Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten. I have not worked much on other technologies, like SAP or VMware's virtualization part, on-prem infrastructure, or cloud infrastructure. Instana Infrastructure Monitoring is so fast and easy to adapt that it works fine. I have not explored other operating systems or infrastructure solutions because my company doesn't have that customer scale. Most of our customers are on-prem or on AWS or Azure, but Instana Infrastructure Monitoring adapts to their infrastructure very well. My company came to know how well Instana Infrastructure Monitoring adapts to our customers' infrastructures when we take care of the PoC phase. Around 12 to 15 people in my company use the product.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has provided visibility with ease of implementation and allowed multiple teams to quickly onboard it."
"We have found that we're able to get in and out of troubleshooting issues much more rapidly, which in turn, of course, enables us to spend more time on our products."
"Its integration is most valuable because you can integrate it with various service providers such as AWS, .Net, etc."
"It has saved us a lot of trouble in implementation."
"It has a high-level insight into the infrastructure model of the application and provides important detailed data on the host and metrics, which is the main concern of our customers."
"The product has offered increased visibility via logging APM, metrics, RUM, etc."
"The integration into AWS is key as well as our software is currently bound to AWS."
"The dashboards are great."
"The product's initial setup is easy."
"The product is easy to deploy."
 

Cons

"There are some areas on log filtering screens where the user interface can take some getting used to."
"The ease of implementation needs improvement."
"The dashboard could be improved. It would be helpful to get a view of specific things that we need to monitor for our application."
"We need a lot of modules since we collect all data logs from all operating systems."
"Datadog has a lot of documentation, but a lot of that documentation assumes you know how the service works, which can lead to confusion."
"When the logs are too big, and Datadog splits them, the JSON format breaks and it is not so useful for us."
"The current way accounts are billed could be vastly improved - especially when involving multiple organizations across multiple accounts in combination with reserved commitments."
"They could enhance the alerting functions by creating a new feature to add direct SMS notifications, on-call rotation scheduling, etc., that could replace the need to have this as an external third-party solution integration."
"The product’s scalability is an area with certain limitations, making it an area where improvements are required."
"Instana Infrastructure Monitoring needs to support monitoring of the .NET framework since it is one of the areas where the solution currently has shortcomings."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"At my last company, we did see ROI, specifically around response time. We could get to mission critical things that were down and losing revenue on immediately. So, the product paid itself back."
"The pricing and licensing through AWS Marketplace has been good. It would be nice if it was cheaper, but their pricing is reasonable for what it is. Sometimes, for their newer features, they charge as if it's fully fleshed out, even though it is a newer feature and it may have less stuff than their other items."
"​Pricing seems reasonable. It depends on the size of your organization, the size of your infrastructure, and what portion of your overall business costs go toward infrastructure."
"The price is better than some competing products."
"I am not satisfied with its licensing. Its payment is based on the exported data, and there was an explosion of the data for three or four weeks. My customer was not alerted, and there was no way for them to see that there has been an explosion of data. They got a big invoice for one or two months. The pricing model of Datadog is based on the data. The customer was quite surprised about not being alerted about this explosion of data. They should provide some kind of alert when there is an increase in usage."
"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."
"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"The cost of the tool is around 130 USD per month."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
29%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Insurance Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
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 times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...
Which would you choose - Datadog or Dynatrace?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Dynatrace. Dynatrace offers network ...
What needs improvement with Instana Infrastructure Monitoring?
The product’s scalability is an area with certain limitations, making it an area where improvements are required.
What is your primary use case for Instana Infrastructure Monitoring?
I use the solution in my company, especially if an application is down and it is considered to be a P1 issue or a critical issue. The network team will blame the application team, while the applica...
 

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
booxware, drivenow, scopevisio, enevo, TimoCom, mobitech
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Instana Infrastructure Monitoring and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,174 professionals have used our research since 2012.