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Datadog vs Instana Infrastructure Monitoring comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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
2nd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (3rd), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
Instana Infrastructure Moni...
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
32nd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
22nd
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 January 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Datadog is 4.1%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Instana Infrastructure Monitoring is 0.7%, 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 (%)
Datadog4.1%
Instana Infrastructure Monitoring0.7%
Other95.2%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Dhroov Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
Site Reliability Engineer at Grainger
Has improved incident response with better root cause visibility and supports flexible on-call scheduling
Datadog needs to introduce more hard limits to cost. If we see a huge log spike, administrators should have more control over what happens to save costs. If a service starts logging extensively, I want the ability to automatically direct that log into the cheapest log bucket. This should be the case with many offerings. If we're seeing too much APM, we need to be aware of it and able to stop it rather than having administrators reach out to specific teams. Datadog has become significantly slower over the last year. They could improve performance at the risk of slowing down feature work. More resources need to go into Fleet Automation because we face many problems with things such as the Ansible role to install Datadog in non-containerized hosts. We mainly want to see performance improvements, less time spent looking at costs, the ability to trust that costs will stay reasonable, and an easier way to manage our agents. It is such a powerful tool with much potential on the horizon, but cost control, performance, and agent management need improvement. The main issues are with the administrative side rather than the actual application.
Hakimuddin Ronaque - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Manager at Lauren Information Technologies Pvt Ltd
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 seamless integration between Datadog and hundreds of apps makes onboarding new products and teams a breeze."
"The most valuable feature of Datadog is its logs."
"The dashboards provide a comprehensive and visually intuitive way to monitor all our key data points in real-time, making it easier to spot trends and potential issues."
"Datadog has clear dashboards and good documentation."
"The infrastructure monitoring capabilities are really valuable. You can just log on and see everything that is happening within an IT environment."
"Thanks to the logs, we manage to make better reports through Jira and also to trace the request with more facility than we would be able to do otherwise."
"The product has offered increased visibility via logging APM, metrics, RUM, etc."
"The infrastructure monitoring capabilities, especially for our Kubernetes clusters, have helped us optimize resource allocation and reduce costs."
"The product is easy to deploy."
"The product's initial setup is easy."
 

Cons

"I've only been using Datadog for a few months, and at first, it was frankly overwhelming in terms of both the UI and the available capabilities."
"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is really expensive."
"I think better access to their engineers when we have a problem could be better."
"Datadog could improve the flexibility with AI and ML concepts. This will allow customers to be more leveraged towards publishing."
"It can be overwhelming for new people as it has a lot of features."
"Another issue that I have is with the search syntax, it could be simpler and it feels like there are too many ways to do the same things."
"The monitors can be improved."
"The UI has a lot going on. It should be simpler and have a better way to onboard someone new to using Datadog."
"The product’s scalability is an area with certain limitations, making it an area where improvements are required."
"Instana Infrastructure Monitoring needs to support monitoring of the .NET framework since it is one of the areas where the solution currently has shortcomings."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."
"The price is better than some competing products."
"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"The pricing came up a bit compared to their competitors. It is not that the price has risen, but that the competitors have gone down. They keep adding more features that I would have expected to be baked in at a more nominal price. I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the pricing, but not enough to jump ship."
"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 cost of the tool is around 130 USD per month."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise99
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: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.