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.
"The solution has good features."
"Grafana is able to connect with multiple data sources, unlike Elasticsearch."
"Collaboration: Shares data and dashboards across teams."
"The best feature was the creation of graphs and trends."
"The most valuable aspect is customization. There are many customizations possible, so I like that."
"This solution provides valuable insights into the health of our infrastructure in real time."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana is the ease to build dashboards from observability construction. Additionally, the page services and integration are good."
"Compatibility with Prometheus databases and the Spring Boot application make it the first choice when moving toward an SRE model."
"The most valuable feature of Instana Dynamic APM is auto-instrumentation."
"With Instana, the interface and the UI are very simple to use."
"It's great for monitoring services and applications."
"It is a stable solution."
"Its GUI is really good and it easy to understand for non-technical users."
"Instana is very fast to implement and deploy because the dashboards are automated and don't need configuration."
"Visually, it's very good. It provides everything needed for dynamic detection, which is very useful."
"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."
"Writing queries can be a bit difficult because the syntax must be maintained."
"There are some areas of network drives that are not showing as expected based on server usage."
"One area for improvement in Grafana is that depending on your version, you have to pay for the features, making the license expensive. It would be great if the licensing model could be more flexible. In the next release of Grafana, I want cluster creation to be available, which would help in Grafana deployment and scaling. Currently, the scaling process for the solution is a bit complicated."
"Grafana need to improve the logging functionality."
"The solution has room for improvement with a better API to help automate the construction of the dashboards easier."
"Trigger limits are difficult to see in a graph."
"Grafana doesn't provide anything for reporting."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"While it is already quite good, there is room for improvement in terms of providing better functionality"
"The App Connect middleware does not integrate with or show corresponding sub nodes."
"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."
"Maybe log monitoring could be better."
"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."
"They could improve the product’s dashboards and provide more dashboard options."
"Its SLI and SLA features need improvement in setting up alerts."
"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, Sentry, Azure Monitor, Elastic Observability and Dynatrace, whereas Instana Dynamic APM is most compared with Dynatrace, AppDynamics, New Relic, Elastic Observability and Sentry. See our Grafana vs. Instana Dynamic APM report.
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We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.