APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MONITORING

IBM OBSERVABILITY BY INSTANA APM

WINNER: OVERALL

With IBM’s acquisition of application performance monitoring provider Instana in December 2020, the company has made the IBM Observability by Instana platform available for enabling robust enterprise application performance monitoring. The offering is designed to manage microservices and cloud-native applications in multiple environments, including hybrid cloud and bare-metal machines, and provides a domain-specific AI engine to speed up issue resolution and improve event management. IBM also recently rolled out the ability to remotely monitor multiple IBM instances on the platform, a capability that supports agents including Linux, Windows and Unix OS on AIX. In addition, IBM has enabled inspection for nine additional languages and expanded Instana Host Agent installation to different Red Hat OpenShift configurations.

Finalist: AppDynamics

Cisco’s AppDynamics launched its Secure Application offering this year to simplify vulnerability management and protect against attacks in real-time. AppDynamics also announced an integration between Dash Studio and ThousandEyes, another Cisco solution, to give IT teams one place to visualize performance data for end users, hybrid cloud and the internet.

Finalist: Datadog APM

Datadog expanded its APM offering to connect Python and Node.js Lambda functions to AWS managed services in one trace, even if a request triggers multiple functions and servers. The company also released an extension for Azure App Service that allows users to capture request traces from .NET Azure web apps automatically and allows users a single platform to correlate APM data with logs. Datadog also introduced automatic faulty deployment detection and request flow mapping.

Finalist: New Relic One

Recently added features for the New Relic One observability platform include a new network performance monitoring feature and ways for users to remove monitoring gaps in Kubernetes environments. The company also updated the platform’s dashboards with more visualization options, reduced loading time and ways to bring over visualizations from other parts of the platform.

Finalist: Splunk Observability Cloud

Splunk recently launched its Observability Cloud to give users a full-stack, analytics-powered, enterprise-grade solution for APM, real user monitoring, infrastructure monitoring and log investigation. The APM feature gives users insights into cloud-native, microservice and monolithic apps, along with visibility into performance and trace data on any cloud and existing infrastructure.