We performed a comparison between Grafana and Instana Dynamic APM based on real PeerSpot user reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Grafana is open source, flexible in integration, and has a strong community with helpful forums. While Instana has a user-friendly GUI and real-time data generation, it falls short in terms of integration and AI-based anomaly detection. Overall, Grafana is preferred for its wide range of features and scalability.
"This solution provides valuable insights into the health of our infrastructure in real time."
"Visualisation: It is easy to create beautiful, understanding graphs, snapshots to share the graphs with people who do not have access to Grafana, and templating to create powerful graphs."
"The initial setup is straightforward with just a few clicks on the solution's cloud."
"What I found most valuable in Grafana is that it has a lot of integrations and features that I need for data processing and visualization."
"We can write queries in different languages, which is beneficial for visualization."
"It gives us the visibility we need. I like that when we add deployment markers or release markers, we know exactly when an issue arises. For instance, if there is an increased usage of CPU, we can link it directly to the deployment that might have caused the issue. It increases productivity and observability. We can now easily tell when a certain issue arises. It's way easier to debug because it can point you to certain things based on these markers, and we can debug easier."
"The most important feature of Grafana is its alarm formatting capability."
"The solution has good features."
"The platform’s most valuable feature is the ability to monitor the performance of containers for request and response analysis."
"With Instana, the interface and the UI are very simple to use."
"Visually, it's very good. It provides everything needed for dynamic detection, which is very useful."
"Its GUI is really good and it easy to understand for non-technical users."
"The most valuable feature of Instana Dynamic APM is auto-instrumentation."
"With auto-discovery, we didn't need to consider much. We just installed the agent on the host and it was able to detect everything from the host level up to the service level, for whatever stack was installed, and that includes containers and dockers."
"Instana is very fast to implement and deploy because the dashboards are automated and don't need configuration."
"Sometimes it's able to provide a proper RCA on its own. It's able to correlate different events that occurred and that becomes like an RCA in itself."
"The main drawback is the necessity for endpoint monitoring."
"It is limited on the reporting type supported, which is important for managerial-level officers who want reports that are either general or specific."
"It would be helpful if they simplified the data source."
"The solution should include online support."
"Trigger limits are difficult to see in a graph."
"I find issues with Grafana. For example, I am unable to open some services there. Then, we have to open ten different tabs to get it fixed. And it's annoying when there's something going on; we want to check Grafana, and it throws four different errors."
"There are not a lot of plugins for financial market monitoring."
"If there was an issue on one node, we couldn't drill down and see all the issues on other nodes."
"While it is already quite good, there is room for improvement in terms of providing better functionality"
"Maybe log monitoring could be better."
"Its SLI and SLA features need improvement in setting up alerts."
"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."
"Many managers, as well as our customers, used to ask for reports, such as "top X number of queries that are slow," or "top pages that have the highest number of issues." This is something that can be improved by Instana. Currently, they don't have that kind of reporting available out-of-the-box."
"We'd always like to see additional functionalities."
"The solution's monitoring is pretty weak and should be improved."
"The integration could be improved with more plugins or open API."
Grafana is ranked 6th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 39 reviews while Instana Dynamic APM is ranked 23rd in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 12 reviews. Grafana is rated 8.0, while Instana Dynamic APM is rated 7.4. The top reviewer of Grafana writes "Agent-free with great dashboards and an active community". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Instana Dynamic APM writes "A really good GUI that is easy for non-technical users to understand". Grafana is most compared with New Relic, Azure Monitor, Sentry, Dynatrace and Elastic Observability, whereas Instana Dynamic APM is most compared with Dynatrace, AppDynamics, New Relic, Elastic Observability and Splunk Enterprise Security. See our Grafana vs. Instana Dynamic APM report.
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