Datadog vs. IBM Instana

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Datadog
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Datadog is a monitoring service for IT, Dev and Ops teams who write and run applications at scale, and want to turn the massive amounts of data produced by their apps, tools and services into actionable insight.
$0
Up to 5 hosts
IBM Instana
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Instana, an IBM company since the December 2020 acquisition, provides APM services for SOA, microservices, containerized applications and Kubernetes, and cloud native applications, as well as discovery and monitoring for IT assets.
$75
per month per host
Pricing
DatadogIBM Instana
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
Up to 5 hosts
Log Management
$1.27
Per Million Log Events
Standard
$15/host
Up to 500 hosts
Infrastructure
$15.00
Per Host Per Month
APM
$31.00
Per Host Per Month
Enterprise
Custom
500+ hosts
SaaS
$75
per month per host
Self-Hosted
$93.80
per month per host
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DatadogIBM Instana
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DatadogIBM Instana
Considered Both Products
Datadog

No answer on this topic

IBM Instana
Chose IBM Instana
Datadog provides a more comprehensive platform, including APM, infrastructure monitoring, and log management.
AppDynamics like IBM Instana offers end-to-end visibility, APM and business performance monitoring.
IBM Instana competitive advantage might lie in its automatic …
Chose IBM Instana
We selected IBM Instana because it is more accurate than Datadog.
Chose IBM Instana
As a DevOps engineer, I've explored various Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools, including New Relic for real-time insights, AppDynamics for code-level visibility, Dynatrace for AI-driven monitoring, Datadog for comprehensive observability, Splunk for log management, …
Chose IBM Instana
We have used them and for the moment we have chosen IBM Instana first of all because of the price because it is accessible and it works in terms of the results we have obtained, also the way of presenting the schemes and the performance of the systems is very good.
Top Pros

No answers on this topic

Top Cons

No answers on this topic

Best Alternatives
DatadogIBM Instana
Small Businesses
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Score 8.5 out of 10
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Score 8.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Instana
IBM Instana
Score 8.9 out of 10
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Instana
IBM Instana
Score 8.9 out of 10
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DatadogIBM Instana
Likelihood to Recommend
9.1
(22 ratings)
9.0
(27 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.9
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DatadogIBM Instana
Likelihood to Recommend
Datadog
DataDog Is well suited to all of the Infrastructure Monitoring Solutions, DB monitoring, and other Network monitoring also. It's not well suited because it cannot give perfect Infrastructure recommendations for our use case but also For example: If we are using AWS DB to monitor performance insights then Datadog is less effective there because AWS gives very niche recommendations.
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IBM
I would recommend IBM Instana based on its strengths in automating application performance monitoring, dynamic tracing, and its ability to handle modern, containerized environments effectively. The automatic discovery and mapping feature, along with AI-powered anomaly detection, provide valuable insights for proactive issue resolution. However, I would consider factors such as the organization's specific technology stack, scalability requirements, and budget constraints. Conducting a thorough evaluation, including a trial or proof of concept, would be essential to ensure that IBM Instana aligns with our unique needs and contributes positively to our technology and business objectives.
Read full review
Pros
Datadog
  • APIs, the ability to interact with the data we pull into data dog is key. We port the information over to Servicenow, so the ability to pull everything into DataDog, then Servicenow, is a key component of our success here at Wayfair.
  • Simple Interface - clean, useful, effective. Allows users to use DataDog for one reason, get work done.
  • Lightweight agent on hosts
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IBM
  • Collecting Kubernetes and Infra level logs and presenting in easy to understand visuals.
  • Tracing the end-to-end journey of an event and also categorizing by technology and Endpoints
  • Built-in and custom alerts help to monitor almost all of scenarios without much additional configuration.
  • Ability to create Applications to logical group important flows
Read full review
Cons
Datadog
  • We had a couple "integrations" that had some issues during setup, but Support addressed them very quickly
  • Unnecessary alerts about DataDog components...by the time I see them, they're almost always also fixed
  • I wish there was a DataDog mobile app that would have dedicated alerts (configurable per alert to override Do Not Disturb setting) instead of relying on emails notifications that could be overlooked in the midst of many incoming emails around the same time.
Read full review
IBM
  • I believe that the "live" option in monitoring does not truly update the status in real-time, thus I must manually update to feel comfortable.
  • The call analysis tool might be improved, third-party resources are restricted, and the pricing is slightly more than competitors in comparable categories.
Read full review
Usability
Datadog
The user interface is quite intuitive with the exception of the network map. As a deployer of software, it is trivial to setup.
Read full review
IBM
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Datadog
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.
Read full review
IBM
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Datadog
We are still trying other products, but people still like Datadog. After setting up a dashboard, it's great for monitoring instances on Datadog. Also, the DevOps team had a good time setting up Datadog. It means Datadog was way easier to set up compared to those others.
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IBM
We chose IBM Instana for several reasons, and the most important one is that we didn't have to make changes in our code for nearly all of our applications for it to work. We are happy with the decision we made to use IBM Instana.
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Return on Investment
Datadog
  • Visibility into website issues and performance problems has improved our company communication.
  • Handling and detecting site issues faster has improved customer satisfaction and retention.
  • Configuration of the Datadog site can take a bit of time and we lost a bit of developer time during that process.
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IBM
  • System down time is shortened as our ability to troubleshoot issues goes up.
  • Potential downtime is stopped as we are able to slow down calls/ availability of calls in response to monitoring the dashboard.
  • We are able to react to issues quickly through the smart alert system rather than manual checks.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Datadog Screenshots

Screenshot of Out-of-the-box and easily customizable monitoring dashboards.Screenshot of Datadog is built to give visibility across teams. You can discuss issues in-context with production data, annotate changes and notify your team, see who responded to that alert before, and remember what was done to fix it.Screenshot of Datadog seamlessly unifies traces, metrics, and logs—the three pillars of observability.Screenshot of Collect monitoring data from across your entire stack with Datadog's 400+ built-in integrations.Screenshot of Datadog's Service Map decomposes your application into all its component services and draws the observed dependencies between these services in real timeScreenshot of Centralize log data from any source.