Datadog vs. IBM Instana vs. LogicMonitor

Datadog may be better suited for teams that have a more out-of-the-box infrastructure, on the primary platforms Datadog supports. You may also have better results if you have a bigger team dedicated to devops and/or a bigger budget. We found that trying to adapt it to our use case (small team, .NET on AWS Fargate) wasn't feasible. We continually ran into roadblocks that required us to dig through documentation (and at times, having to figure out some documentation was wrong), go back and forth with support, and in my opinion, waste money on excessive and unintended usages due to opaque pricing models and inaccurate usage reports, as well as broken/non-functional rate sampling controls.

Incentivized

With enterprise IT assets in a multitude of ecosystems, cloud infrastructures and sometimes still left stuck in a legacy on prem architecture, IBM Instana makes it easy to get the right data to drive development and / or DevSecOps processes with tangible input from the target environment itself.

Incentivized

The example I will give will explain my rating for it. One employee left our company due to a personal issue, and at that time, our team was working on a highly secure project. He wanted to take revenge on our company, so he began hacking our systems from the outside. Since it appears that someone without authorization is attempting to access our systems, LogicMonitor simultaneously alerted our team to the problem. We stopped that threat with LogicMonitor.

Incentivized

• The thing which Datadog does really well, one of them are its broad range of services integrations and features which makes it one step observability solution for all. We can monitor all types of our application, infrastructure, hosts, databases etc with Datadog.
• Its custom dashboard feature which helps us to visualize the data in a better way . It supports different types of charts through those charts we can create our dashboard more attractive.
• Its AI powered alerting capability though that we can easily identify the root cause and also it has a low noise alerting capability which means it correlated the similar type of issues.

Incentivized

• Can monitor application(s) and system(s) with very large throughput of transactions by the second ( it gets everything !!!)
• Provide strong drill down for your applications and will tell you where the points of failure of an application's is ( servers , network , Databases , etc you name it )
• Very easy to set up and have it up and running when using the SaaS solution. There's an on premise solution which works just as well but requires more effort and preparation from an infrastructure point of view for your teams to implement.
• Continuously improve their features and their agents auto-update and keep up. All while not interfering with your applications.
• Let's you create your own dashboards and visualizations that can be tailored for different kind of users with the data collected.
• Create your own events and smart alerts so you can know on the spot if something is happening or is likely to happen that needs addressing on your applications / systems

Incentivized

• It shows us system issues right away so we can fix them fast.
• It finds new devices on its own, so we do not miss anything.
• It alerts us only when something really unusual happens.
• Its dashboards make it easy for everyone to see system health.
• It helps us see trends so we are ready for busy times.

Incentivized

• Alert windows cause lag in notifications (e.g. if the alert window is X errors in 1 hour, we won't get alerted until the end of the 1 hour range)
• I would appreciate more supportive examples for how to filter and view metrics in the explorer
• I would like a more clear interface for metrics that are missing in a time frame, rather than only showing tags/etc. for metrics that were collected within the currently viewed time frame

Incentivized

• It's very difficult to create custom dashboards, only a handful of scenarios can be visualized to dashboards.
• Extracting information from Instana to further analysis into excel for example is something that can be improved. Using an API to get data is very limiting.
• Open telemetry features which allow to send application data to Instana is not working as documented.

Incentivized

• Segmentation at an instance level not just the resource when clients are sharing the same device but shouldn't see each other's relevant data
• ARM CPU support for collectors to allow for a lighter weight appliance deployment
• WMI collection with a Linux collector so a windows collector would not be needed or a virtual appliance template that can be used to deploy collectors

Incentivized

Definitely will not revisit after our issues and, in my opinion, poor support.

Incentivized

Instana has been able to fulfill our all requirement and provide out of box solution for multiple component like AWS RDS Monitoring and real time alerting setup on basis of that. it is also easy to integrate with other open-source alerting and monitoring tools which makes it easier to incorporate into our solutions

Incentivized

This product has met virtually all of our needs. It was easy to implement and has been simple to support. Customization has been intuitive with many options available. They keep adding features and expanding available options. The future of LogicMonitor looks even better than it is today which is very promising. The management and support teams at LogicMonitor are always helpful

Incentivized

There are so many features that it can be hard to figure out where you need to go for your own use case. For example, RUM monitoring us buried in a "Digital Experience" sidebar setting when this is one of our key use cases that I sometimes struggle to find in the application. It appears that ECS + Fargate monitoring was recently released which is great because we had to build a lambda reporting solution for ephemeral task monitoring. But this new feature was never on my radar until I starting clicking around the application.

Incentivized

IBM Instana totally alters our monitoring approach since it increases the stability of the system and simplifies the process of problem solving. And since it helps to lower the degree of alert exhaustion that we experience, it is a total game changer for us.

Incentivized

Set up is super easy. Just stand up a small Linux or Windows server to act as a collector. There are no agents to install on monitored devices and all you need is SNMP or WMI access. When creating dashboards, all you have to do is find the widget on the device you want to show up and choose the menu option to add it.

Incentivized

The support team usually gets it right. We did have a rather complicate issue setting up monitoring on a domain controller. However, they are usually responsive and helpful over chat. The downside would be I don’t think they have any phone support. If that is important to you this might not be a good fit.

Incentivized

IBM instana support team is good but when we ask them for support, they keep asking same thing again and again and mostly there is no solution

Incentivized

The sales team support we received was top notch. They worked hand in hand to make sure the product met all expectations. So far we have not really had to work with support that much; we have worked with setup team after purchase to deploy product fully. No issues so far and we are four weeks in.

Incentivized

Add good training

Incentivized

The training is good but room to improve

Incentivized

Documentation was difficult to work through, rollout was catastrophic (completely outage)

Incentivized

I did not truly dedicate myself to implementing LogicMonitor. However, I overheard the IT team members explain that "LogicMonitor is perfect for us as it has made most of the work automated, and implementation and training sessions were perfect for us." Thus, I can state that everything went smoothly with our implementation.

Incentivized

Our logs are very important, and Datadog manages them exceptionally well. We frequently use Datadog services for our investigations. Use case: Monitor your apps, infrastructure, APIs, and user experience.


Key features:


Logs, metrics, and APM (Application Performance Monitoring)


Real-time alerting and dashboards


Supports Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, and other integrations


RUM (Real User Monitoring) and Synthetics





✅ Best for backend, server, and distributed systems monitoring.

Incentivized

Unlike the above-mentioned platforms, IBM Instana's real-time observability and multiple Cloud Application performance monitoring options are a productive, very impressive solution for tracing and detecting performance issues. Its root cause analytics production is a wonderful Cloud system with responsive, easy-to-use functions during initial configuration.

Basically, we did not have any idea about it and how to choose, but we asked one of our former bosses, as they were very experienced with it, so they helped us by clarifying a few things between New Relic and LogicMonitor, as they told us that if you are looking for an automated option, then there is no better option than LogicMonitor.

Incentivized

Pricing seems to be getting more and more aggressive, I worry that it's going to turn into ServiceNow or SAP and everything minor feature will be an extreme cost that prices out us and our customers

Incentivized

Haven't really used it but our initial onboarding PS was disappointing. Felt like we were being told what we needed to cover as opposed to what we wanted to cover. In addition, we were pushed into using the PS in tight time frames and we were not ready to do so.

Incentivized

• Saved us (time & money) from developing our own monitoring utilities that would pale in comparison
• Alerts allow us to remedy issues before our customers even know about them
• Tracking resource usage over time allows us to better plan for future needs, before it becomes a pain-point.

Incentivized

• Increase up time by early failure identification and performance optimization based on findings in Instana.
• Enhance user experience by mapping user issues with backend failures
• Automated actions help fixing known issues without human intervention
• increase support team efficiency by root cause analysis which decrease the incident solving time

Incentivized

• We Eliminated an on-prem monitoring tool which was in excess of 25 servers
• A decrease in time to response from our Network Operations Center resulted in a more consistent client experience
• Dynamic alert thresholds helped reduce alerting by about 10 to 15% as soon as we turned it on for volatile metrics like CPU and memory

Incentivized