Compare and evaluate APM and Observability vendors in 2023

Datadog is a pioneer in cloud monitoring for cloud-native companies and its APM is part of a broad portfolio of complementary monitoring services.

AppDynamics meshes automation (or AIOps) features tightly with its APM.

One of the original APMs, New Relic has rebuilt their product to meet the needs of a modern observability platform.

Instana offers close to comprehensive metric instrumentation at real-time intervals.

Splunk Observability Cloud focuses on application performance and health monitoring but is an expensive solution that is fragmented across several tools. However, it performs very well for large enterprise environments with huge volumes of data.

Sumo Logic Application Observability is suited for mid-sized teams looking for application performance monitoring and observability that is tightly integrated with a robust log management platform. It also has comprehensive and integrated tracing, logging and metrics under developer control.

Dynatrace is an application performance monitoring platform that is purpose-built for complex, hybrid enterprise environments. It offers real-time data and insights into application health and lots of AI tools that support the quick identification and resolution of performance issues.

Elastic built its observability platform on its search tools and the well-known ELK stack.

Lightstep is an observability platform focussed on monitoring and tracing challenges in microservice-based environments.

Honeycomb is an observability platform with real-time data analysis and visualization. It is differentiated by its high-cardinality analytics and the ability for developers to instrument their code themselves to get the monitoring in place.