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 #5 with an average rating of 7.8, while Instana is ranked #21 with an average rating of 7.8. Microsoft holds a 6.0% 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

12,653 Views
12,020 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Instana Dynamic APM

Read 14 Instana Dynamic APM reviews

2,060 Views
2,039 Comparison Views

84% willing to recommend

Azure Monitor

Instana Dynamic APM

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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: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Azure Monitor vs. Instana Dynamic APM

July 2025

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Helped 865,295 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

5th

Average Rating

7.6

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

21st

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Azure Monitor is 6.0%, down from 8.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Instana Dynamic APM is 1.0%, down from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

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

"Technical support is helpful."

"I use the solution to monitor the infrastructure and applications."

"In the last company where I worked about a year ago, it looked very simple."

"I am impressed by the reporting on the average eight ports that we get from this solution."

"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."

"It is a move-in powerful feature compared to other market-leading tools."

"The most valuable feature is that it ensures our servers are up."

"The solution's most valuable features are its ease of use and support for multiple environments"

More Azure Monitor pros

"The most valuable feature of Instana Dynamic APM is auto-instrumentation."

"Visually, it's very good. It provides everything needed for dynamic detection, which is very useful."

"We can easily perform root cause analysis using the tool."

"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."

"With Instana, the interface and the UI are very simple to use."

"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."

"The detailing of our application behavior and user experience is most valuable. In case there is an issue, we typically use Instana to figure it out. We can drill down to the application and figure out what's going on and where the issue is."

More Instana Dynamic APM pros

Cons

"The solution should have cross-connection or cross-communication between tech partners."

"I would like more transparency when we use the solution with another environment, like on-premises, or on another cloud environment, like AWS or GCP."

"No improvements are needed from my perspective."

"This solution has fewer features than some of its competitors, so adding more features to it would make it better."

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

"It's really complex to retrieve or query the logs in Azure Monitor."

"They can simplify the overall complexity since you have multiple data sources in the cloud for monitoring. It's quite simple, but there are so many portals. It takes time to work with it. If they could simplify the user configuration, that would be good."

"The cost skyrockets once you start using it, and there are complaints that the actual cost of the Kubernetes cluster was less than the cost they were incurring for Azure Monitor."

More Azure Monitor cons

"The auto-remediation features must be improved."

"While it is already quite good, there is room for improvement in terms of providing better functionality"

"The solution's monitoring is pretty weak and should be improved."

"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."

"Its SLI and SLA features need improvement in setting up alerts."

"Maybe log monitoring could be better."

"The integration could be improved with more plugins or open API."

"The configuration of Instana Dynamic APM needs improvement because it requires quite a bit of work."

More Instana Dynamic APM cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing is a monthly fee."

"I would rate Azure Monitor a two out of five for affordability."

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

"The Azure Insight is a little bit expensive."

"It's a costly solution"

"The tool's pricing is very good. I could say that Microsoft offers different cost models, which are listed on the product's website."

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

"The tool is expensive."

More Azure Monitor pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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."

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

"Instana Dynamic APM is more affordable for small and medium-sized companies compared to other vendors."

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

"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."

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865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

28%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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.

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What needs improvement with Azure Monitor?

The primary challenge is the documentation. The major challenge that remains is the costing factor for the logs ingestion. The cost skyrockets once you start using it, and there are complaints that...

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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 22% 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 10% 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 16% of the time

Datadog vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 8% of the time

IBM Application Performance Management vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 7% of the time

New Relic vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 6% of the time

More Instana Dynamic APM Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Azure Monitor

August 2025

Download Azure Monitor product report

Buyer's Guide

Instana Dynamic APM

August 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

July 2025

Free Report: Azure Monitor vs. Instana Dynamic APM

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