Azure Application Insights vs Dynatrace Application Monitoring
Azure Application Insights
azure.microsoft.com
Dynatrace Application Monitoring
dynatrace.comSide by side
| Figure | Azure Application Insights | Dynatrace Application Monitoring |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | $58/mo |
| Free plan | — | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | Yes |
| Android | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Application Performance Monitoring | 8.4 (#8) | 8.4 (#10) |
| Founded | 1975 | 2005 |
| Headquarters | Redmond, Washington, United States | Boston, Massachusetts, United States |
| Integrations | Documented integrations include Azure SDK tracing, Cosmos DB SDK observability, .NET OpenTelemetry, Azure Container Apps, Azure Data Explorer, and Azure AI Foundry. | Dynatrace lists AWS, Android, Apache HTTP Server, Microsoft Azure, Docker, and Go among supported technologies; its Hub contains apps, extensions, and technologies. |
| Pricing model | Azure Monitor pricing lists usage-based ingestion and other metered features; its pricing page displays some rates as "$-" rather than a numeric price. | Dynatrace Platform Subscription uses a minimum annual platform spend commitment and charges based on actual usage against a rate card. |
| Purpose | Application Insights is an Azure Monitor service for collecting and analyzing application telemetry. | Dynatrace application monitoring measures application performance, availability, and user experience to help identify and resolve issues before they affect customers. |
| Security | Application Insights supports TLS 1.2 and 1.3, and Microsoft Entra authentication can restrict telemetry ingestion to authenticated identities. | Dynatrace says its data security controls secure and encrypt data end to end and are regularly and independently audited. |
| Support | Microsoft recommends its Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Distro for new projects and describes it as supported by Microsoft. | Standard Support is available during business hours Monday through Friday, while Enterprise Success & Support is available 24/7/365. |
Plans
Azure Application Insights
- Pay-as-you-go (Azure Monitor Logs)Price not published
Dynatrace Application Monitoring
- Full-Stack Monitoring$58 a month
In their own words
Azure Application Insights
Azure Application Insights is an Azure Monitor service for collecting and analyzing application telemetry. It combines alerts, metrics, logs, workbooks, Grafana dashboards, and investigation tools such as application maps, live metrics, transaction search, availability monitoring, failure analysis, and performance views. Usage analytics cover users, sessions, events, funnels, flows, and cohorts. For.NET applications, diagnostics include profiling and a snapshot debugger for exceptions. Microsoft recommends the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Distro for most code-based server-side scenarios; browser telemetry uses the Application Insights JavaScript SDK. Setup paths cover web apps, virtual machines, JavaScript apps, Azure Functions, Kubernetes, and AI agents. Telemetry is stored in a Log Analytics workspace, and the service can work with applications hosted outside Azure. A daily ingestion cap can stop excess collection until the next UTC day, while sampling can reduce volume. The pricing page lists 90 days of no-charge retention, with longer retention charged by retained data volume. Ingestion is usage-based, with the first 5 GB per month per billing account free.
Dynatrace Application Monitoring
Dynatrace Application Monitoring tracks application performance, availability and user experience to help teams find problems before they affect customers. It brings together real-user experience, response-time metrics, infrastructure and cloud environments. The product automatically detects application dependencies and follows transactions across tiers. Dynatrace says its AI analyzes events to identify breakdowns and can locate problems down to individual lines of code. Real-user and synthetic monitoring support web and mobile apps and end-to-end customer journeys. OneAgent gathers host data, identifies running processes and activates instrumentation for the application stack. Supported technologies listed include AWS, Android, Apache HTTP Server, Microsoft Azure, Docker and Go; the Hub also contains apps, extensions and technologies. Its capabilities include distributed and transaction tracing, dependency mapping, real-user monitoring and log correlation, with a hybrid deployment model. The advertised platform trial lasts 15 days. Full-Stack Monitoring is listed at $58 a month, billed at $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour per 8 GiB host, and includes 10 days of trace retention, extendable to 10 years. Standard Support is available during weekday business hours; Enterprise Success & Support is available 24/7/365.