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Azure Monitor vs Instana Dynamic APM comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

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

Azure Monitor
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
21st
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Monitoring Software (12th)
Instana Dynamic APM
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
51st
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Azure Monitor is 1.7%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Instana Dynamic APM is 1.0%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Azure Monitor1.7%
Instana Dynamic APM1.0%
Other97.3%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Andy Rabern - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a outsourcing company with 201-500 employees
Telemetry insights have improved how I track user behavior and application performance daily
I feel Azure Monitor does a fair job. I do feel it is not a streaming service in my opinion. There are advantages to having stream messaging and logging on that level. But for what it is, I feel it does well. My perspective is more based on an Application Insights agent running on a service or an app service and sending the telemetry via the agent, and also doing the filtering of telemetry at the agent level so you are not having a ton of telemetry. I believe Azure Monitor does pretty much the same thing. I have also used tools such as New Relic, and New Relic is a much more robust tool, but that is a different product and you are going to pay for that. It is a different offering altogether. The subscription that we had at the time allowed for a couple gigabytes of telemetry during the month, and I believe that telemetry only lives for about two months. You have to experiment with it to see how much you want to pay. I was not really involved in the pricing. It was more along the lines of we were running up against our limits in terms of the amount of free telemetry or telemetry that we get with our subscription, and so we either needed to scale back or turn specific telemetry types off or do some more sampling. It is nice that those capabilities are there so that you can reduce the amount of telemetry. I cannot really speak to pricing but I do believe that it is somewhat reasonable for Azure Monitor. New Relic is pretty expensive, I believe.
Muhammad Jawwad Hassan - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Consultant at Arcana Info
A really good GUI that is easy for non-technical users to understand
Our company uses the solution for one of our bank clients. We use App Connect middleware to monitor services and applications such as Docker, Kubernetes, MongoDB, and MS SQL Server. We also monitor the bottleneck for all servers.  We currently have 20 users at one of our branches. We plan to expand…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Azure Monitor has made it much easier for us to constantly monitor the infrastructure and applications with possible problems."
"I find the query language in this tool very beneficial, as it allows me to customize some dashboards and create alerts according to my thresholds and metrics."
"It is a helpful tool and provides proactive information about the infrastructure."
"The solution very easily integrates with Azure services and in one click you can monitor your resource."
"The solution's most valuable features are its ease of use and support for multiple environments"
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"Azure Monitor is useful because of the useful application insights and telemetry, such as metrics and logs."
"It is a move-in powerful feature compared to other market-leading tools."
"If a key monitored value has crossed a threshold, it sends out an alert. And the solution is able to intelligently find out if something is beyond the range that it normally resides in."
"The primary selling point of this product is its unparalleled transparency into the infrastructure."
"Visually, it's very good. It provides everything needed for dynamic detection, which is very useful."
"The most valuable features are the monitoring with granularity by one second, which allows real-time data generation, and the fast implementation."
"It's a good tool to implement across the board if you can make it into your images or as part of your configuration management tool."
"We can easily perform root cause analysis using the tool."
"Instana is very fast to implement and deploy because the dashboards are automated and don't need configuration."
"With Instana, the interface and the UI are very simple to use."
 

Cons

"They need to work with other cloud providers - not just Azure."
"It's really complex to retrieve or query the logs in Azure Monitor."
"What I feel is when I open a screen of Azure, some places are very complex to navigate to. It is not very user-friendly when it comes to accessing certain sections."
"There is room for improvement in stability."
"Using Azure Monitor and Azure Arc separately to monitor different environments can be complicated."
"The query builder could be better. In comparison to other monitoring tools, in order to use Azure Monitor, your engineers need to have KQL experience. If they don't, it's not intuitive as a system."
"This solution could be improved with more out-of-the-box functionalities and artificial intelligence to complete event correlation."
"Setting up this solution is complex. It's also missing the functionality of assigning 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."
"PHP was less stable. The coverage of Python versions was maybe less than it could be, but we didn't have any stability issues with Python, as such."
"New Relic has a better UI in terms of how it presents the data."
"The API monitoring aspect could be better."
"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."
"We'd always like to see additional functionalities."
"They could improve the product’s dashboards and provide more dashboard options."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My company is okay with the current pricing of the solution."
"There is a monthly fee for the alerts triggered and the data stored."
"The licensing is a monthly fee."
"Azure Monitor is one of the more cost effective solutions on the market."
"The product offers a pay-as-you-go model to users. The charges are to be paid according to the usage of the product."
"The tool's pricing is very good. I could say that Microsoft offers different cost models, which are listed on the product's website."
"The Azure Insight is a little bit expensive."
"It's a costly solution"
"The pricing is $1,200 per year which is a bit high compared to other vendors."
"It's reasonably priced and manageable, especially for individuals who grasp the significance of application monitoring."
"Pricing is quite competitive. Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic were all several times more expensive than Instana, both the on-prem and the SaaS versions. Price-wise they are a lot more competitive than anyone else out there."
"Instana Dynamic APM is more affordable for small and medium-sized companies compared to other vendors."
"Its pricing isn't a big pain point. Its pricing seems to be better than some of the other competing products in the market, but they also have some of the features and functionalities that are better than Instana."
"The solution's pricing is comparable to other products."
"The solution is less expensive than one of its competitors."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business23
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise29
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

How does Splunk compare with Azure Monitor?
Splunk handles a high amount of data very well. We use Splunk to capture information and as an aggregator for monitoring information from different sources. Splunk is very good at alerting us if we...
What needs improvement with Azure Monitor?
I feel Azure Monitor does a fair job. I do feel it is not a streaming service in my opinion. There are advantages to having stream messaging and logging on that level. But for what it is, I feel it...
What is your primary use case for Azure Monitor?
I am a developer who uses Azure Monitor for telemetry of the applications that I work on. Application Insights is one of those tools, and I have also used other non-Azure products before. Currently...
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Sample Customers

Rackspace, First Gas, Allscripts, ABB Group
Daxko Lifts Fitness Studios Through COVID Regulations with Quick Engineering PivotsAltissia Meets SLAs to Support Student DeadlinesImmocloud Unlocks Observability to Modernize Real EstateEnento Group Boosts Service Reliability with Real-Time Visibility into Application Performance Instana’s Observability for Amazon EKS Helps Yara Deliver Digital Farming Solutions
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Monitor vs. Instana Dynamic APM and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.