What is Instana and what are its top alternatives?
Instana is a popular application performance management tool that offers automatic monitoring of application infrastructure. It provides real-time insights into cloud-native applications, helping users to manage performance, health, and resource utilization. Instana's key features include automatic discovery and monitoring of microservices, dynamic tracing, incident management, and root cause analysis. However, some limitations of Instana include its relatively high cost and complexity for small or medium-sized businesses.
- Datadog: Datadog is a robust monitoring and analytics platform that offers infrastructure monitoring, APM, log management, and more. Key features include comprehensive monitoring, customizable dashboards, and easy integration with popular tools. Pros of Datadog include its wide range of monitoring capabilities, while its cons include potentially high costs for large-scale usage.
- New Relic: New Relic is a well-known APM tool that provides real-time application performance monitoring and troubleshooting. Key features include performance optimization, transaction tracing, and code-level visibility. Pros of New Relic include its user-friendly interface, while its cons include limitations on data retention for some pricing tiers.
- AppDynamics: AppDynamics offers APM solutions for monitoring and optimizing complex, distributed applications. Key features include application mapping, business transaction monitoring, and performance alerts. Pros of AppDynamics include its deep visibility into application performance, while its cons include its cost relative to other options.
- Dynatrace: Dynatrace is an AI-powered APM platform that provides automatic monitoring of applications and microservices. Key features include continuous automation, AI-driven insights, and full-stack observability. Pros of Dynatrace include its advanced AI capabilities, while its cons may include the learning curve for some users.
- SolarWinds AppOptics: SolarWinds AppOptics offers a comprehensive APM solution for monitoring and troubleshooting application performance. Key features include distributed tracing, customizable dashboards, and detailed performance metrics. Pros of SolarWinds AppOptics include its ease of use, while its cons may include limitations on customization for some users.
- Stackify Retrace: Stackify Retrace is a lightweight APM tool that provides code-level performance insights, error tracking, and log management. Key features include application profiling, centralized logging, and real-time monitoring. Pros of Stackify Retrace include its affordability and ease of implementation, while its cons may include limited scalability for large enterprise applications.
- Raygun: Raygun offers APM and error tracking solutions for monitoring application performance and identifying bugs and issues. Key features include crash reporting, user tracking, and detailed error diagnostics. Pros of Raygun include its user-friendly interface and deep error insights, while its cons may include limited customizability compared to other tools.
- Sentry: Sentry is an open-source APM tool that specializes in error tracking and monitoring for applications. Key features include real-time error alerts, detailed stack traces, and integrations with popular development tools. Pros of Sentry include its open-source nature and extensive community support, while its cons may include potential limitations for comprehensive performance monitoring compared to more robust APM platforms.
- Opsgenie: Opsgenie is an incident response tool that integrates with a variety of monitoring and alerting platforms to streamline incident management processes. Key features include on-call scheduling, alert escalations, and incident reporting. Pros of Opsgenie include its ease of integration with existing monitoring tools, while its cons may include potentially high costs for larger teams.
- Prometheus: Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit that is widely used for recording real-time metrics in a time-series database. Key features include a powerful query language, flexible data model, and easy integration with different systems. Pros of Prometheus include its scalability and flexibility, while its cons may include the need for additional components for full APM capabilities compared to dedicated APM platforms like Instana.
Top Alternatives to Instana
DatadogDatadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog! ...
AppDynamicsAppDynamics develops application performance management (APM) solutions that deliver problem resolution for highly distributed applications through transaction flow monitoring and deep diagnostics. ...
New RelicThe world’s best software and DevOps teams rely on New Relic to move faster, make better decisions and create best-in-class digital experiences. If you run software, you need to run New Relic. More than 50% of the Fortune 100 do too. ...
SignalFxWe provide operational intelligence for today’s elastic architectures through monitoring specifically designed for microservices and containers with: -powerful and proactive alerting -metrics aggregation -visualization into time series data ...
LightStepIt diagnoses anomalies and slowdowns, spanning mobile, monoliths, and micro services: best-in-class observability, at scale, for modern applications. ...
SysdigSysdig is open source, system-level exploration: capture system state and activity from a running Linux instance, then save, filter and analyze. Sysdig is scriptable in Lua and includes a command line interface and a powerful interactive UI, csysdig, that runs in your terminal. Think of sysdig as strace + tcpdump + htop + iftop + lsof + awesome sauce. With state of the art container visibility on top. ...
GrafanaGrafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins. ...
PrometheusPrometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true. ...
Instana alternatives & related posts
- Monitoring for many apps (databases, web servers, etc)139
- Easy setup107
- Powerful ui87
- Powerful integrations84
- Great value70
- Great visualization54
- Events + metrics = clarity46
- Notifications41
- Custom metrics41
- Flexibility39
- Free & paid plans19
- Great customer support16
- Makes my life easier15
- Adapts automatically as i scale up10
- Easy setup and plugins9
- Super easy and powerful8
- AWS support7
- In-context collaboration7
- Rich in features6
- Docker support5
- Cost4
- Full visibility of applications4
- Monitor almost everything4
- Cute logo4
- Automation tools4
- Source control and bug tracking4
- Simple, powerful, great for infra4
- Easy to Analyze4
- Best than others4
- Best in the field3
- Expensive3
- Good for Startups3
- Free setup3
- APM2
- Expensive20
- No errors exception tracking4
- External Network Goes Down You Wont Be Logging2
- Complicated1
related Datadog posts
Our primary source of monitoring and alerting is Datadog. We’ve got prebuilt dashboards for every scenario and integration with PagerDuty to manage routing any alerts. We’ve definitely scaled past the point where managing dashboards is easy, but we haven’t had time to invest in using features like Anomaly Detection. We’ve started using Honeycomb for some targeted debugging of complex production issues and we are liking what we’ve seen. We capture any unhandled exceptions with Rollbar and, if we realize one will keep happening, we quickly convert the metrics to point back to Datadog, to keep Rollbar as clean as possible.
We use Segment to consolidate all of our trackers, the most important of which goes to Amplitude to analyze user patterns. However, if we need a more consolidated view, we push all of our data to our own data warehouse running PostgreSQL; this is available for analytics and dashboard creation through Looker.
Hey there! We are looking at Datadog, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic as options for our web application monitoring.
Current Environment: .NET Core Web app hosted on Microsoft IIS
Future Environment: Web app will be hosted on Microsoft Azure
Tech Stacks: IIS, RabbitMQ, Redis, Microsoft SQL Server
Requirement: Infra Monitoring, APM, Real - User Monitoring (User activity monitoring i.e., time spent on a page, most active page, etc.), Service Tracing, Root Cause Analysis, and Centralized Log Management.
Please advise on the above. Thanks!
- Deep code visibility21
- Powerful13
- Real-Time Visibility8
- Great visualization7
- Easy Setup6
- Comprehensive Coverage of Programming Languages6
- Deep DB Troubleshooting4
- Excellent Customer Support3
- Expensive5
- Poor to non-existent integration with aws services2
related AppDynamics posts
Hey there! We are looking at Datadog, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic as options for our web application monitoring.
Current Environment: .NET Core Web app hosted on Microsoft IIS
Future Environment: Web app will be hosted on Microsoft Azure
Tech Stacks: IIS, RabbitMQ, Redis, Microsoft SQL Server
Requirement: Infra Monitoring, APM, Real - User Monitoring (User activity monitoring i.e., time spent on a page, most active page, etc.), Service Tracing, Root Cause Analysis, and Centralized Log Management.
Please advise on the above. Thanks!
We are evaluating an APM tool and would like to select between AppDynamics or Datadog. Our applications are largely hosted on Microsoft Azure but we would keep the option to move to AWS or Google Cloud Platform in the future.
In addition to core Azure services, we will be hosting other components - including MongoDB, Keycloak, PagerDuty, etc. Our applications are largely C# and React-based using frontend for Backend patterns and Azure API gateway. In addition, there are close to 50+ external services integrated using both REST and SOAP.
New Relic
- Easy setup415
- Really powerful344
- Awesome visualization245
- Ease of use194
- Great ui151
- Free tier106
- Great tool for insights80
- Heroku Integration66
- Market leader55
- Peace of mind49
- Push notifications21
- Email notifications20
- Heroku Add-on17
- Error Detection and Alerting16
- Multiple language support13
- SQL Analysis11
- Server Resources Monitoring11
- Transaction Tracing9
- Apdex Scores8
- Azure Add-on8
- Analysis of CPU, Disk, Memory, and Network7
- Detailed reports7
- Performance of External Services6
- Error Analysis6
- Application Availability Monitoring and Alerting6
- Application Response Times6
- Most Time Consuming Transactions5
- JVM Performance Analyzer (Java)5
- Browser Transaction Tracing4
- Top Database Operations4
- Easy to use4
- Application Map3
- Weekly Performance Email3
- Pagoda Box integration3
- Custom Dashboards3
- Easy to setup2
- Background Jobs Transaction Analysis2
- App Speed Index2
- Super Expensive1
- Team Collaboration Tools1
- Metric Data Retention1
- Metric Data Resolution1
- Worst Transactions by User Dissatisfaction1
- Real User Monitoring Overview1
- Real User Monitoring Analysis and Breakdown1
- Time Comparisons1
- Access to Performance Data API1
- Incident Detection and Alerting1
- Best of the best, what more can you ask for1
- Best monitoring on the market1
- Rails integration1
- Free1
- Proce0
- Price0
- Exceptions0
- Cost0
- Pricing model doesn't suit microservices20
- UI isn't great10
- Expensive7
- Visualizations aren't very helpful7
- Hard to understand why things in your app are breaking5
related New Relic posts
Hey there! We are looking at Datadog, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic as options for our web application monitoring.
Current Environment: .NET Core Web app hosted on Microsoft IIS
Future Environment: Web app will be hosted on Microsoft Azure
Tech Stacks: IIS, RabbitMQ, Redis, Microsoft SQL Server
Requirement: Infra Monitoring, APM, Real - User Monitoring (User activity monitoring i.e., time spent on a page, most active page, etc.), Service Tracing, Root Cause Analysis, and Centralized Log Management.
Please advise on the above. Thanks!
I need to choose a monitoring tool for my project, but currently, my application doesn't have much load or many users. My application is not generating GBs of data. We don't want to send the user information to New Relic because it's a 3rd party tool. And we can deploy Kibana locally on our server. What should I use, Kibana or New Relic?
- High cardinality5
- Scalability5
- World class customer support4
- Easy to install4
- Fastest alerts4
related SignalFx posts
- Powerful UI3
- Easy setup3
- Observability End-to-End3
- Great Value3
- Fast RCA3
related LightStep posts
Sysdig
- Powerful web app5
- Easy setup5
- Monitoring5
related Sysdig posts
We have Prometheus as a monitoring engine as a part of our stack which contains Kubernetes cluster, container images and other open source tools. Also, I am aware that Sysdig can be integrated with Prometheus but I really wanted to know whether Sysdig or sysdig+prometheus will make better monitoring solution.
We are looking for a centralised monitoring solution for our application deployed on Amazon EKS. We would like to monitor using metrics from Kubernetes, AWS services (NeptuneDB, AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, etc) and application microservice's custom metrics.
We are expected to use around 80 microservices (not replicas). I think a total of 200-250 microservices will be there in the system with 10-12 slave nodes.
We tried Prometheus but it looks like maintenance is a big issue. We need to manage scaling, maintaining the storage, and dealing with multiple exporters and Grafana. I felt this itself needs few dedicated resources (at least 2-3 people) to manage. Not sure if I am thinking in the correct direction. Please confirm.
You mentioned Datadog and Sysdig charges per host. Does it charge per slave node?
- Beautiful89
- Graphs are interactive68
- Free57
- Easy56
- Nicer than the Graphite web interface34
- Many integrations26
- Can build dashboards18
- Easy to specify time window10
- Can collaborate on dashboards10
- Dashboards contain number tiles9
- Open Source5
- Integration with InfluxDB5
- Click and drag to zoom in5
- Authentification and users management4
- Threshold limits in graphs4
- Alerts3
- It is open to cloud watch and many database3
- Simple and native support to Prometheus3
- Great community support2
- You can use this for development to check memcache2
- You can visualize real time data to put alerts2
- Grapsh as code0
- Plugin visualizationa0
- No interactive query builder1
related Grafana posts
Grafana and Prometheus together, running on Kubernetes , is a powerful combination. These tools are cloud-native and offer a large community and easy integrations. At PayIt we're using exporting Java application metrics using a Dropwizard metrics exporter, and our Node.js services now use the prom-client npm library to serve metrics.
Why we spent several years building an open source, large-scale metrics alerting system, M3, built for Prometheus:
By late 2014, all services, infrastructure, and servers at Uber emitted metrics to a Graphite stack that stored them using the Whisper file format in a sharded Carbon cluster. We used Grafana for dashboarding and Nagios for alerting, issuing Graphite threshold checks via source-controlled scripts. While this worked for a while, expanding the Carbon cluster required a manual resharding process and, due to lack of replication, any single node’s disk failure caused permanent loss of its associated metrics. In short, this solution was not able to meet our needs as the company continued to grow.
To ensure the scalability of Uber’s metrics backend, we decided to build out a system that provided fault tolerant metrics ingestion, storage, and querying as a managed platform...
(GitHub : https://github.com/m3db/m3)
Prometheus
- Powerful easy to use monitoring47
- Flexible query language38
- Dimensional data model32
- Alerts27
- Active and responsive community23
- Extensive integrations22
- Easy to setup19
- Beautiful Model and Query language12
- Easy to extend7
- Nice6
- Written in Go3
- Good for experimentation2
- Easy for monitoring1
- Just for metrics12
- Bad UI6
- Needs monitoring to access metrics endpoints6
- Not easy to configure and use4
- Supports only active agents3
- Written in Go2
- TLS is quite difficult to understand2
- Requires multiple applications and tools2
- Single point of failure1
related Prometheus posts
Grafana and Prometheus together, running on Kubernetes , is a powerful combination. These tools are cloud-native and offer a large community and easy integrations. At PayIt we're using exporting Java application metrics using a Dropwizard metrics exporter, and our Node.js services now use the prom-client npm library to serve metrics.
Why we spent several years building an open source, large-scale metrics alerting system, M3, built for Prometheus:
By late 2014, all services, infrastructure, and servers at Uber emitted metrics to a Graphite stack that stored them using the Whisper file format in a sharded Carbon cluster. We used Grafana for dashboarding and Nagios for alerting, issuing Graphite threshold checks via source-controlled scripts. While this worked for a while, expanding the Carbon cluster required a manual resharding process and, due to lack of replication, any single node’s disk failure caused permanent loss of its associated metrics. In short, this solution was not able to meet our needs as the company continued to grow.
To ensure the scalability of Uber’s metrics backend, we decided to build out a system that provided fault tolerant metrics ingestion, storage, and querying as a managed platform...
(GitHub : https://github.com/m3db/m3)