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Dynatrace vs IBM Instana Observability comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 16, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.9
Dynatrace boosts IT efficiency, reduces outages, and drives a 451% return by enhancing uptime and proactive problem management.
Sentiment score
6.0
IBM Instana Observability boosts efficiency with quick issue identification, reduces costs, and improves response times and application performance.
Using Dynatrace directly improved application uptime and reduced customer impacting incidents.
senior DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
ROI is hard to specify; however, incidents like impending ransomware attacks highlight its value, though those are exceptional events.
Enterprise Architect at DXC Technology
Save money by identifying problems, thereby reducing monetary losses on their application side.
Technical Manager, Consulting at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It provides a single pane of glass from which I can see what is happening with all the servers in my infrastructure, which saves time.
UNIX/LINUX, ENTERPRISE SERVER AND STORAGE ADMINISTRATOR at Fidelity Bank Plc
It made a notable difference from when we were almost blind to being able to respond to calls immediately.
Software engineer at EJADA
If we have a monitoring tool, we can save our transactions and see the performance of the application using MTTR and MTTD.
Technical Manager, Consulting at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.1
Dynatrace's support is praised for responsiveness and expertise, although complex queries may occasionally receive slower responses.
Sentiment score
6.4
IBM Instana support is mixed, with varied responsiveness, reliance on local teams, and average ratings between five and six.
They have a good reputation, and the support is commendable.
Enterprise Architect at DXC Technology
The technical support from Dynatrace is excellent.
System Administrator at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Whenever we faced any issues, we could get timely resolution from their support.
senior DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
They are very slow to respond and integrate new features.
DevOps engineer at Yara International
IBM support for Instana is responsive and helpful.
UNIX/LINUX, ENTERPRISE SERVER AND STORAGE ADMINISTRATOR at Fidelity Bank Plc
We did have experiences where a significant issue arose during implementation, often involving compatibility problems with JavaScript libraries used by IBM Instana Observability.
Technical Manager at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.2
Dynatrace scales well for various environments, managing large data volumes, with scalability rated highly by most users.
Sentiment score
7.5
IBM Instana Observability excels in scalability for enterprises, supporting microservices, with positive user reviews and efficient growth handling.
If it's an enterprise, increasing the number of instances doesn’t pose problems.
Enterprise Architect at DXC Technology
It is a powerful tool and helped us to reduce customer downtime and increase work efficiency.
senior DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
The scalability of Dynatrace is very significant, especially considering the current improvements in their features.
Technical Manager, Consulting at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
More innovations are coming in every day, so it is scalable and more applications are becoming container-based.
UNIX/LINUX, ENTERPRISE SERVER AND STORAGE ADMINISTRATOR at Fidelity Bank Plc
IBM Instana Observability demonstrates scalability, especially in dynamic, distributed environments such as microservices and Kubernetes.
Technical Manager, Consulting at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Dynatrace is highly praised for its stability, reliability, and proactive monitoring, ensuring minimal outages and continuous high performance.
Sentiment score
8.4
IBM Instana Observability is rated high in stability, with users consistently praising its reliable and steady performance.
Generally, all are stable at ninety-nine point nine nine percent, but if the underlying infrastructure is not deployed correctly, stability may be problematic.
Enterprise Architect at DXC Technology
There have been no stability issues with Dynatrace.
System Administrator at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Dynatrace is a SaaS product with frequent agent management updates.
Principal Consultant at a tech consulting company with 11-50 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Users find Dynatrace expensive and complex, seeking intuitive interfaces, improved customization, security, infrastructure monitoring, and AI enhancements.
IBM Instana Observability needs enhancements in log management, AI models, user interface speed, support, and cost monitoring.
The definition of enterprise is loosely used, however, from a holistic security perspective, including infrastructure, network, ports, software, applications, transactions, and databases, there are areas lacking, especially in network monitoring tools.
Enterprise Architect at DXC Technology
Dynatrace could enhance cost and licensing structures, as the current pricing can be expensive for large-scale deployments.
BizOps Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
I'm specifically looking at AIOps and how we can monitor AIOps-related things, considering we have LLMs and all that stuff.
Performance Architect at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees
I had many false positives with IBM Instana Observability. Then I fixed the filters and it became more accurate on the errors reported.
Software engineer at EJADA
One main issue I found with IBM Instana Observability was the customer support, which was very poor when we needed some features to be enabled or integrated into IBM Instana Observability sensors.
DevOps engineer at Yara International
It is not open-source, and I have to be a partner to get more access to the products.
UNIX/LINUX, ENTERPRISE SERVER AND STORAGE ADMINISTRATOR at Fidelity Bank Plc
 

Setup Cost

Dynatrace costs can be high and complex, but users find value in its advanced features and transparency.
IBM Instana offers competitive pricing in India, with a straightforward model and simple implementation despite varying cost perceptions.
Dynatrace is known to be costly, which delayed its integration into our system.
System Administrator at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
If setting up in a large scale environment, it is overwhelming because it is expensive.
senior DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
The cost can be controlled from our side, and it is very transparent with Dynatrace regarding DPS and licensing.
Technical Manager, Consulting at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I find the cost of IBM Instana Observability to be very affordable compared to competitors because the pricing mechanism is based on the host that we monitor, unlike other competitors such as DataDog and Dynatrace, whose pricing is based on other factors.
Technical Manager, Consulting at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It is not that costly, especially since we only use two instances.
Software engineer at EJADA
I think the pricing is good and I do not think it is high.
DevOps at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Valuable Features

Dynatrace provides AI-driven root cause analysis, full-stack observability, and user monitoring to enhance system performance and efficiency.
IBM Instana Observability enhances performance with real-time insights, APM trace capabilities, and integration features to improve operational efficiency.
The integration with Power BI for generating detailed reports is a standout feature.
System Administrator at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Dynatrace's AI-driven Davis engine absolutely helps identify performance issues by showing root cause analysis for us up to 200%; whatever is integrated, if it is visible, it can stitch and show.
Technical Associate at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Dynatrace links compute with services and services with code and other components.
Principal Consultant at a tech consulting company with 11-50 employees
IBM Instana Observability has positively impacted my organization by making it easy to observe the entire infrastructure under one platform, which was the biggest advantage of onboarding onto IBM Instana Observability.
DevOps engineer at Yara International
IBM Instana Observability has impacted my organization positively in that it has helped me find out what the issue is in real-time because of its one-second granularity and its ability to identify issues as quickly as possible.
UNIX/LINUX, ENTERPRISE SERVER AND STORAGE ADMINISTRATOR at Fidelity Bank Plc
With multiple servers and multiple applications, IBM Instana Observability allows us to resolve issues very quickly because we immediately know that a disk is full, the storage is full, or the database is down.
Technical Lead at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Dynatrace
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
2nd
Ranking in AI Observability
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
358
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (6th), Mobile APM (2nd), Container Monitoring (1st), AIOps (2nd)
IBM Instana Observability
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
25th
Ranking in AI Observability
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Dynatrace is 6.6%, down from 11.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Instana Observability is 0.9%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Dynatrace6.6%
IBM Instana Observability0.9%
Other92.5%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Manish Indupuri - PeerSpot reviewer
senior DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
AI-driven insights have reduced downtime and improved cross-team collaboration
We encountered some challenges while using Dynatrace. Although the initial setup was smooth, fine-tuning alert thresholds and custom metrics took some time. Another challenge was that Dynatrace charges based on host units, so we had to carefully plan our agent deployments. The licensing model is expensive. Additionally, the complexity of setup is an issue. While OneAgent and auto-discover services are powerful, the setup is more complex compared to other tools such as Prometheus and Grafana. These integrations are simple and basic, but Dynatrace setup requires more complexity based on the environment. For new users wanting to use Dynatrace, it is difficult. However, the AI-related solutions and metrics took us to the next level for identifying and fixing things. Dynatrace requires an agent for operation. OneAgent is powerful, but it is also resource-heavy. On lightweight nodes or older systems, the agent can slightly impact performance. If Dynatrace could implement a lightweight agent behavior, we could make things faster. Additionally, if Dynatrace could add a long-term retention policy so that we could store more data and find fine-grained details, that would help us. While Dynatrace managed edition supports on-premises deployment, the SaaS version depends on cloud connectivity. For highly regulated or air-gapped environments, setup and updates can be challenging. Although the initial setup is smooth, if someone wants to fine-tune it and fully understand the tool end-to-end, it could be tricky.
FranciscoGálvez - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Manager at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
Observability has improved collaboration and predicts failures across distributed services
From my perspective, IBM Instana Observability is quite technical. Compared to some competitors, it offers an abundance of information about system performance but lacks planning or capacity planning information. You do not receive reports with recommendations; instead, it provides only the technical layer. Other companies, like Compuware, give more functional information about your environment, while IBM Instana Observability provides only limited functional insights. This means you often must interpret the data independently. Unlike other tools that can offer recommendations to save resources or costs, IBM Instana Observability does not provide that functionality. On the bright side, it is much more affordable than some other options, but it isn't complete. If you want full functionality with IBM Instana Observability, you also need to acquire other products for additional insights in monitoring areas, such as networking monitoring tools or similar products. For instance, we often recommend Turbonomic, which provides complementary insights. One potential feature that could improve IBM Instana Observability is the ability to translate KPIs into monetary terms. It would be interesting to have a product that integrates IBM Instana Observability with Turbonomic, as Turbonomic can utilize data from IBM Instana Observability to inform you about unnecessary spending and suggest whether you can consolidate servers or optimize containers for quicker response times. Implementing some level of simulation or capacity planning would greatly enhance the current capabilities of IBM Instana Observability.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
22%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business78
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise298
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

Any advice about APM solutions?
The key is to have a holistic view over the complete infrastructure, the ones you have listed are great for APM if you need to monitor applications end to end. I have tested them all and have not f...
What cloud monitoring software did you choose and why?
While the environment does matter in the selection of an APM tool, I prefer to use Dynatrace to manage the entire stack. Both production and Dev/Test. I find it to be quite superior to anything els...
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Instana Observability?
I would evaluate the implementation process of IBM Instana Observability as not complex at all because you pay the license, and IBM takes care of everything. The only problem we occasionally face, ...
What needs improvement with IBM Instana Observability?
From my perspective, IBM Instana Observability is quite technical. Compared to some competitors, it offers an abundance of information about system performance but lacks planning or capacity planni...
What is your primary use case for IBM Instana Observability?
I usually recommend IBM Instana Observability for companies in the academic environment, as I have been working in a consultancy company for the last three years, where one of our customers built t...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Audi, Best Buy, LinkedIn, CISCO, Intuit, KRONOS, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, ULTA Beauty, Lenovo, Swarovsk, Nike, Whirlpool, American Express
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Dynatrace vs. IBM Instana Observability and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.