No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Azure Monitor vs Instana Dynamic APM comparison

 

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
13th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Monitoring Software (8th)
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 August 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Azure Monitor is 2.0%, down from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Instana Dynamic APM is 0.9%, 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 Monitor2.0%
Instana Dynamic APM0.9%
Other97.1%
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

"The solution is quite stable."
"Azure Monitor is very stable."
"Among the valuable features of this solution, Application Insights stands out as one of the most significant. It provides insights into application performance and helps identify issues and bottlenecks."
"Some good integration capabilities are present in the tool."
"The solution works well overall. It's easy to implement and simple to use."
"This is a good enough product for anyone wanting something that might not be top of the range but it does the work easily, is simple to configure and is a fair price."
"I can conclude reports for the monthly, weekly, and peak time of the resources."
"Azure Monitor's best features are its graphs and charts, the different visibility options, and reporting."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Instana Dynamic APM is auto-instrumentation."
"The primary selling point of this product is its unparalleled transparency into the infrastructure."
"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."
"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."
"We can easily perform root cause analysis using the tool."
"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."
"The most valuable features are the monitoring with granularity by one second, which allows real-time data generation, and the fast implementation."
 

Cons

"I believe Azure Monitor is already a top-notch solution with excellent functionality and there is not much I would suggest for improvement. However, there is one limitation that certain features require payment, even for testing purposes, which can be a challenge."
"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."
"This solution has fewer features than some of its competitors, so adding more features to it would make it better."
"If I contact the First Line Support, they seem disconnected and lack technical information."
"I need connectivity with cost management."
"The product should integrate well with other tools or clouds in the future, as it is one of the areas where the product currently has certain shortcomings."
"The product is not as good as a lot of market-leading products; I wouldn't recommend the solution at all and would direct other companies to go to either ExtraHop, New Relic, or Dynatrace instead."
"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."
"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."
"Sometimes, the issue arises from user changes, such as adjusting firewall settings without proper consideration, leading to compatibility issues within the network monitoring."
"The solution's monitoring is pretty weak and should be improved."
"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."
"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."
"Maybe log monitoring could be better."
"The integration could be improved with more plugins or open API."
"The App Connect middleware does not integrate with or show corresponding sub nodes."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The Azure Insight is a little bit expensive."
"It is a pay-as-you-go model. I find it very cost-effective."
"My company is okay with the current pricing of the solution."
"Besides standard licensing fees the customer needs to additionally pay based on the ingested data size"
"The licensing is a monthly fee."
"It's a costly solution"
"The price of the solution is reasonable."
"The solution’s pricing depends on how much logs it collects."
"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 solution's pricing is comparable to other products."
"The pricing is $1,200 per year which is a bit high compared to other vendors."
"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."
"It's reasonably priced and manageable, especially for individuals who grasp the significance of application monitoring."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.
909,099 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

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...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Overview

 

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: August 2026.
909,099 professionals have used our research since 2012.