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Datadog vs Instana Infrastructure Monitoring comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 13, 2025

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

Datadog
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
3rd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
188
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (4th), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th)
Instana Infrastructure Moni...
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
37th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
24th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Datadog is 5.0%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Instana Infrastructure Monitoring is 0.5%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Datadog5.0%
Instana Infrastructure Monitoring0.5%
Other94.5%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer820579 - PeerSpot reviewer
Single pane of glass, easy to share dashboards, and good for monitoring
We've had some issues where we had Datadog automatically turned on in AWS regions that we weren't using, which incurred a small but steady cost that amounted to tens of thousands of dollars spent over a few weeks. I wish there was a global setting that lets an admin restrict which regions DD is turned on in as a default setup step. Sometimes, the APM service dashboard link isn't sharable. I click something in the service catalog, and on that service's APM default view, I try to share a link to that with a teammate, and they reach a blank or error screen. I wish there was more organization and detail in the suggestions when I use the query editor. I'm never quite sure when the autofill dropdown shows up if I'm seeing some custom tag or some default property, so I have to know exactly what I'm looking for in order to build a chart. It's hard to navigate and explore using the query autofill suggestions without knowing exactly what tag to look for. It's been a bit hard to understand how data gets sampled or how many data points a particular dashboard value is using. We've had questions over the RUM metrics that we see and we had to ask for help with how values are calculated, bin sizes, etc to get confidence in our data.
Hakimuddin Ronaque - PeerSpot reviewer
Has the capability to automatically integrate with a large number of products
Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten. I have not worked much on other technologies, like SAP or VMware's virtualization part, on-prem infrastructure, or cloud infrastructure. Instana Infrastructure Monitoring is so fast and easy to adapt that it works fine. I have not explored other operating systems or infrastructure solutions because my company doesn't have that customer scale. Most of our customers are on-prem or on AWS or Azure, but Instana Infrastructure Monitoring adapts to their infrastructure very well. My company came to know how well Instana Infrastructure Monitoring adapts to our customers' infrastructures when we take care of the PoC phase. Around 12 to 15 people in my company use the product.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The interface and the integrations make it so easy to connect to the cloud or to the on-premise environment."
"Log management is a great way for me to identify changes in behavior across services and environments as we make changes or as user behavior evolves."
"The fact that everything is under a single pane of glass is really valuable, as developers don't have to spend their time copying correlation IDs across tools to find what they need."
"This is definitely a good product and I would consider them one of the leaders within the application monitoring and cloud monitoring space."
"Dashboards and their versatility are among the most valuable features."
"Straightforward to integrate and automate."
"Datadog infrastructure monitoring has helped us identify health issues with our virtual machines, such as high load, CPU, and disk usage, as well as monitoring uptime and alerting when Kubernetes containers have a bad time staying up."
"Integrating Datadog with other platforms has made our monitoring processes a bit easier. It's not super simple, but it's manageable."
"The product's initial setup is easy."
"The product is easy to deploy."
 

Cons

"I spent longer than I should have figuring out how to correlate logs to traces, mostly related to environmental variables."
"If there were a more cost-effective manner of deploying the tool, we'd be more likely to adopt it more widely."
"The product can be improved by allowing the grouping of APIs to add variables. That way, any API with a unique ID could be grouped together."
"In some cases the screenshots don't match the text as updates are made."
"Datadog could have a better business analysis module."
"I like the idea of monitoring on the go yet it seems the options are still a bit limited out of the box."
"It would be great if usage metrics were automatically created and we could create custom metrics, instead we ended up building some of our own stuff to track and alert on our own usage."
"The pricing should be less of a surprise."
"Instana Infrastructure Monitoring needs to support monitoring of the .NET framework since it is one of the areas where the solution currently has shortcomings."
"The product’s scalability is an area with certain limitations, making it an area where improvements are required."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is better than some competing products."
"It is easy to run up a large bill, so become familiar with the cost of each piece of your bill and use the metrics they supply to estimate and monitor your bill."
"The tool is open-source."
"Pricing and licensing are reasonable for what they give you. You get the first five hosts free, which is fun to play around with. Then it's about four dollars a month per host, which is very affordable for what you get out of it. We have a lot of hosts that we put a lot of custom metrics into, and every host gives you an allowance for the number of custom metrics."
"The pricing and licensing through AWS Marketplace has been good. It would be nice if it was cheaper, but their pricing is reasonable for what it is. Sometimes, for their newer features, they charge as if it's fully fleshed out, even though it is a newer feature and it may have less stuff than their other items."
"At my last company, we did see ROI, specifically around response time. We could get to mission critical things that were down and losing revenue on immediately. So, the product paid itself back."
"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."
"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."
"The cost of the tool is around 130 USD per month."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business78
Midsize Enterprise42
Large Enterprise82
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...
Which would you choose - Datadog or Dynatrace?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Dynatrace. Dynatrace offers network ...
What needs improvement with Instana Infrastructure Monitoring?
The product’s scalability is an area with certain limitations, making it an area where improvements are required.
What is your primary use case for Instana Infrastructure Monitoring?
I use the solution in my company, especially if an application is down and it is considered to be a P1 issue or a critical issue. The network team will blame the application team, while the applica...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Adobe, Samsung, facebook, HP Cloud Services, Electronic Arts, salesforce, Stanford University, CiTRIX, Chef, zendesk, Hearst Magazines, Spotify, mercardo libre, Slashdot, Ziff Davis, PBS, MLS, The Motley Fool, Politico, Barneby's
booxware, drivenow, scopevisio, enevo, TimoCom, mobitech
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Instana Infrastructure Monitoring and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,787 professionals have used our research since 2012.