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

Datadog vs Instana Infrastructure Monitoring comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 19, 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
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
209
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (3rd), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
Instana Infrastructure Moni...
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
32nd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
22nd
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 January 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Datadog is 4.1%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Instana Infrastructure Monitoring is 0.7%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Datadog4.1%
Instana Infrastructure Monitoring0.7%
Other95.2%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Dhroov Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
Site Reliability Engineer at Grainger
Has improved incident response with better root cause visibility and supports flexible on-call scheduling
Datadog needs to introduce more hard limits to cost. If we see a huge log spike, administrators should have more control over what happens to save costs. If a service starts logging extensively, I want the ability to automatically direct that log into the cheapest log bucket. This should be the case with many offerings. If we're seeing too much APM, we need to be aware of it and able to stop it rather than having administrators reach out to specific teams. Datadog has become significantly slower over the last year. They could improve performance at the risk of slowing down feature work. More resources need to go into Fleet Automation because we face many problems with things such as the Ansible role to install Datadog in non-containerized hosts. We mainly want to see performance improvements, less time spent looking at costs, the ability to trust that costs will stay reasonable, and an easier way to manage our agents. It is such a powerful tool with much potential on the horizon, but cost control, performance, and agent management need improvement. The main issues are with the administrative side rather than the actual application.
Hakimuddin Ronaque - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Manager at Lauren Information Technologies Pvt Ltd
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

"The centralized pipeline tracking and error logging provide a comprehensive view of our development and deployment processes, making it much easier to identify and resolve issues quickly."
"The solution has helped our organization with custom events to track specific cases."
"We have been impressed with the uptime and clean and light resource usage of the agents."
"It has a nice UI."
"Datadog has helped my organization improve a lot of response time because we get alerts the minute it happens, which is our only means to reduce incident response time."
"Even if something goes wrong and the Datadog tenant becomes completely compromised or if all our monitors were to get erased for whatever reason, we can always restore all our monitoring setup through Terraform, which provides peace of mind."
"The biggest thing I liked was the combination of all the things - monitoring, log aggregation, and profiling."
"The platform appeals to companies spanning many industries on a global scale."
"The product is easy to deploy."
"The product's initial setup is easy."
 

Cons

"Another issue that I have is with the search syntax, it could be simpler and it feels like there are too many ways to do the same things."
"Datadog is expensive."
"While the documentation is very good, there are areas that need a lot of focus to pick up on the key details."
"We would really like to see more from the Service Catalog."
"The product could do better with its notifications."
"Logging is not a great experience."
"Datadog could always lower the price!"
"The hardest thing we experience is just training people on what to search for when identifying a problem in Datadog, and having some additional training that might be easily accessible would probably be a benefit."
"Instana Infrastructure Monitoring needs to support monitoring of the .NET framework since it is one of the areas where the solution currently has shortcomings."
"The product’s scalability is an area with certain limitations, making it an area where improvements are required."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This solution is budget friendly."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
"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."
"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."
"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"It has always scaled for us. Cost scales up too, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. It's reasonable for what they're providing."
"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"The cost of the tool is around 130 USD per month."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which IT Infrastructure Monitoring solutions are best for your needs.
879,443 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise98
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: December 2025.
879,443 professionals have used our research since 2012.