Azure Monitor vs Instana Dynamic APM comparison

Microsoft and Instana are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. Microsoft is ranked #6 with an average rating of 7.7, while Instana is ranked #22 with an average rating of 7.8. Microsoft holds a 4.9% mindshare in APM, compared to Instana’s 1.0% mindshare. Additionally, 90% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 84% of Instana users who would recommend it.

Azure Monitor

Read 55 Azure Monitor reviews

11,124 Views
9,900 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Instana Dynamic APM

Read 14 Instana Dynamic APM reviews

1,912 Views
1,836 Comparison Views

84% willing to recommend

Azure Monitor

Instana Dynamic APM

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

Instana Dynamic APM and Azure Monitor are leading application performance management tools. Data suggests users favor Instana's user experience, while Azure Monitor excels in integration capabilities.

Features: Instana Dynamic APM provides real-time automation and advanced application monitoring. Users value its dynamic graph analysis and seamless integration with various platforms. Azure Monitor offers comprehensive cloud-native features, robust analytics capabilities, and excellent integration capabilities.

Room for Improvement: Instana users indicate a need for better documentation, more customizable reporting tools, and improved performance with large datasets. Azure Monitor users seek improved alerting features, a more intuitive setup process, and better alert customization.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Instana is noted for its straightforward deployment and responsive customer support with minimal configuration and a quick setup process. Azure Monitor is praised for robust deployment capabilities but sometimes faces criticism for complex configuration, though its customer support remains strong.

Pricing and ROI: Instana’s pricing model is considered flexible by users, with quick ROI due to efficient performance monitoring. Azure Monitor's perceived higher cost is justified by its extensive features and integration capabilities, with users reporting significant ROI despite initial setup costs.

To learn more, read our detailed Azure Monitor vs. Instana Dynamic APM Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Azure Monitor vs. Instana Dynamic APM

September 2025

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Helped 868,787 peers since 2012

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

6th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Monitoring Software (3rd)

Instana Dynamic APM

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

22nd

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Azure Monitor is 4.9%, down from 8.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Instana Dynamic APM is 1.0%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Azure Monitor	4.9%
Instana Dynamic APM	1.0%
Other	94.1%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Muhammad Usman Khawar

Software Engineer (DevOps/ SRE) at Sensys LLC

Native integration simplifies monitoring but documentation and cost improvements are needed

The ease of access in Azure is significant since it's native to the platform and easy to integrate. It has no maintenance overhead, and users don't have to navigate to another portal to get their desired result. It's the handiness that it has, rather than the features. The interpretation from the logs and injection requires custom runbooks. While it's complex, many services provide native insights and workbooks. It does the basic job quite efficiently. They added new kinds of metrics with more integrations to send out metrics. They have even added support for third-party tools that can be integrated. Azure Monitor is working on improvements and becoming more mature. Azure Monitor is stable and scalable. Azure Monitor is evolving with new workbooks and dashboards.

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Muhammad Jawwad Hassan

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…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is a robust, stable product."

"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."

"The solution very easily integrates with Azure services and in one click you can monitor your resource."

"It allows you to set thresholds on the metrics and receive alerts."

"I am monitoring all of my Azure Monitor and getting good reports. I can customize the reports to get the information I need. I am also getting emails about which AAS instances are down and everything in the system related to my services. It is easy to use, scalable, and user-friendly. Microsoft has Many guides and videos to help you understand how to create and use Azure Monitor."

"The tools for logs and metrics are pretty good and easy to use."

"Azure Monitor is really just a source for Dynatrace. It's just collecting data and monitoring the environment and the infrastructure. It is fairly good at that."

"The most valuable feature is that it's stable. It hasn't crossed any thresholds."

More Azure Monitor pros

"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."

"It is user-friendly, but we encounter issues processing input and understanding the graphics, such as seeing a flatline without knowing the cause. When these problems occur, I have to contact my support team to address and fix them. Also, monitoring processing is good."

"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."

"Its GUI is really good and it easy to understand for non-technical users."

"It is a stable solution."

"The platform’s most valuable feature is the ability to monitor the performance of containers for request and response analysis."

"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."

More Instana Dynamic APM pros

Cons

"The solution needs better monitoring. It requires better log controls."

"The biggest one is probably just the user interface. There could be more advanced logging at the database level. They can also improve their query builder to allow you to search for things better, but I last used it about a year ago. They might have already changed a ton of things in the newer versions."

"There are a lot of things that take more time to do, such as charting, alerting, and correlation of data, and things like that. Azure Monitor doesn't tell you why something happened. It just tells you that it happened. It should also have some type of AI. Environments and applications are becoming more and more complex every day with hundreds or thousands of microservices. Therefore, having to do a lot of the stuff manually takes a lot of time, and on top of that, troubleshooting issues takes a lot of time. The traditional method of troubleshooting doesn't really work for or apply to this environment we're in. So, having an AI-based system and the ability to automate deployments of your monitoring and configurations makes it much easier."

"The monitoring of Kubernetes clusters needs improvement to be on par with competitors."

"Automation related to gathering metrics from more applications could be improved."

"The onboarding process of certain assets and the overall UI can be improved in Azure Monitor"

"Although it's not always the case, the price can sometimes get expensive. This depends on a number of factors, such as how many services you are trying to integrate with Azure Monitor and how much storage they're consuming each month (for example, how large are the log files?)."

"When something goes down, we want the option to have automation in place to get it back up again as quickly as possible."

More Azure Monitor cons

"We should be able to go back to scenarios during or before the issue. There should be something like a history playback. Such a feature or functionality would be good."

"New Relic has a better UI in terms of how it presents the data."

"The auto-remediation features must be improved."

"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."

"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."

"Sometimes, the issue arises from user changes, such as adjusting firewall settings without proper consideration, leading to compatibility issues within the network monitoring."

More Instana Dynamic APM cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Azure Monitor is a low-priced solution, which is why it would work best on small-scale projects."

"The solution’s pricing depends on how much logs it collects."

"My company is okay with the current pricing of the solution."

"Azure Monitor is cheaper compared to other third-party monitoring tools."

"Azure Monitor is a competitively priced solution."

"The licensing is a monthly fee."

"It's a costly solution"

"The solution is very costly because you have to pay for various things such as adding to logs and internet alerts."

More Azure Monitor pricing and cost advice

"The solution is less expensive than one of its competitors."

"It's reasonably priced and manageable, especially for individuals who grasp the significance of application monitoring."

"The solution's pricing is comparable to other products."

"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 pricing is $1,200 per year which is a bit high compared to other vendors."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

28%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	23
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	29

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	5

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...

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What do you like most about Azure Monitor?

Azure Monitor is a very easy-to-use product in the cloud environment.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Azure Monitor?

The challenges with Azure Monitor are that it's initially complex to set up because you need multiple components. Azure Monitor is one thing, but within Azure Monitor, you need to bring Log Analyti...

See all answers

What do you like most about Instana Dynamic APM?

The platform’s most valuable feature is the ability to monitor the performance of containers for request and response analysis.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Instana Dynamic APM?

I rate the pricing a seven out of ten. There are no additional costs associated with the product.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Instana Dynamic APM?

Sometimes, the issue arises from user changes, such as adjusting firewall settings without proper consideration, leading to compatibility issues within the network monitoring.

See all answers

Comparisons

Datadog vs Azure Monitor

Compared 19% of the time

Sentry vs Azure Monitor

Compared 14% of the time

Dynatrace vs Azure Monitor

Compared 13% of the time

Grafana vs Azure Monitor

Compared 9% of the time

New Relic vs Azure Monitor

Compared 6% of the time

More Azure Monitor Competitors

Dynatrace vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 51% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 14% of the time

Datadog vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 8% of the time

New Relic vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 6% of the time

Broadcom DX Application Performance Management vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 6% of the time

More Instana Dynamic APM Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Azure Monitor

September 2025

Download Azure Monitor product report

Buyer's Guide

Instana Dynamic APM

September 2025

Download Instana Dynamic APM product report

Overview

Azure Monitor is a comprehensive monitoring solution offered by Microsoft Azure. It provides a centralized platform for monitoring the performance and health of various Azure resources, applications, and infrastructure.

With Azure Monitor, users can gain insights into the availability, performance, and usage of their applications and infrastructure. The key features of Azure Monitor include metrics, logs, alerts, and dashboards. Metrics allow users to collect and analyze performance data from various Azure resources, such as virtual machines, databases, and storage accounts.

Logs enable users to collect and analyze log data from different sources, including Azure resources, applications, and operating systems. Azure Monitor also provides a robust alerting mechanism that allows users to set up alerts based on specific conditions or thresholds. These alerts can be configured to notify users via email, SMS, or other notification channels. Additionally, Azure Monitor offers customizable dashboards that allow users to visualize and analyze their monitoring data in a personalized and intuitive manner.

Azure Monitor integrates seamlessly with other Azure services, such as Azure Automation and Azure Logic Apps, enabling users to automate actions based on monitoring data. It also supports integration with third-party monitoring tools and services, providing flexibility and extensibility.

Overall, Azure Monitor is a powerful and versatile monitoring solution that helps users gain deep insights into the performance and health of their Azure resources and applications. It offers a wide range of features and integrations, making it a comprehensive solution for monitoring and managing Azure environments.

Microsoft

Instana’s Enterprise Observability Platform, powered by automated Application Performance Monitoring, discovers and maps all services, infrastructure, and their inter-dependencies automatically. Instana ingests all observability metrics, traces each request, profiles every process, and updates application dependency maps in real-time to deliver the context and actionable feedback needed by Dev+Ops to optimize application performance, enable innovation, and mitigate risk to help them add value and efficiency to the pipeline. Learn more at https://instana.com.

Instana

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

Buyer's Guide

Azure Monitor vs. Instana Dynamic APM

September 2025

Free Report: Azure Monitor vs. Instana Dynamic APM

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