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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
2nd
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 (4th), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th)
Instana Infrastructure Moni...
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
36th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
25th
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 June 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Datadog is 5.5%, down from 6.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Instana Infrastructure Monitoring is 0.4%, 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

"Datadog's learning platform is second to none."
"The pricing model makes more sense than what we paid for against other competitors."
"Sometimes it's more user friendly for development teams. There are some parts of Datadog that are more understandable for development teams. For example, the APM in Datadog works more manually and works like the tools in New Relic or Grafana, or Elastic. It is easier to understand for software development teams."
"Datadog dashboards are pretty great."
"The two most valuable aspects are the Terraform provider for Datadog and the K8s Orchestrator."
"The many dozens of integrations that the solution brings out of the box are excellent."
"The server monitoring, service monitoring, and user session monitoring are extremely helpful, as they allow us to be alerted ahead of time of issues that users might experience."
"The observability pipelines are the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"The product is easy to deploy."
"The product's initial setup is easy."
 

Cons

"I would love to see more metrics or analytics in IoT devices."
"Federated views for Datadog dashboards are critical as large companies utilize multiple instances of the product and cannot link the metrics or correlate the metrics together. This stunts the usage of Datadog."
"In the past two years, there have been a couple of outages."
"I spent longer than I should have figuring out how to correlate logs to traces, mostly related to environmental variables."
"It can have an artificial intelligence component. Even though I can seamlessly look at end-to-end security, it would be better to have alerts and notifications powered by an AI engine. I am not sure if they have an AI component. We have not reached out to them or looked at it, but this is something that I keep on talking about within our company in terms of features. Such a feature would be good to have, and it would further optimize my Security Ops team's abilities."
"The logging could be improved in the future."
"The documentation leaves a lot to be desired for new users."
"The product can be improved by allowing the grouping of APIs to add variables. That way, any API with a unique ID could be grouped together."
"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

"​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 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."
"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"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."
"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."
"Pricing and licensing are reasonable for what they give you. You get the first five hosts free, which is fun to play around with. Then it's about four dollars a month per host, which is very affordable for what you get out of it. We have a lot of hosts that we put a lot of custom metrics into, and every host gives you an allowance for the number of custom metrics."
"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
16%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Insurance Company
9%
 

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: May 2025.
859,579 professionals have used our research since 2012.