why use instana over another platform?

Happy to help answer this for you! Automation - The single Instana agent automatically detects and observes most technologies with zero or minimal configuration. Datadog is completely manual, an engineer has to install and configure plugins, edit source code, rebuild and push containers, etc. Automation saves time, your engineers can focus on core functionality rather than observability. Automation ensures that no component is deployed or scaled without being monitored. Automation guarantees consistency in tagging across all observability data, machines don't make typos. Context - Instana's unique Dynamic Graph automatically tracks entity relationships over time, therefore at any point in time Instana knows what is talking to what and where it's running. Every bit of data is available with full context and context turns data into information. Datadog relies on accurate manual tagging of data (see Automation above). Metrics logs and traces are available as silos of data, it's up to the users to attempt to stitch it all together. Intelligence - Cloud Native applications are complex, with hundreds of VMs and thousands of containers, multiple releases of code per day. Metrics on graphs on dashboards are no longer enough. Instana's sophisticated anomaly detection algorithms and ML-powered Smart Alerts work together with automatic root cause analysis (powered by the Dynamic Graph) to show the DevOps engineers and SREs what needs to be fixed, what can be optimized. Extraneous events are quashed eliminating alert fatigue and shortening the time to fix. Again Datadog relies on the users to manually configure thresholds and alerts, build and maintain copious dashboards, figure out what is cause and effect during an alert storm. I'm sure Datadog works just fine if you're monitoring a Wordpress site. For enterprise cloud-native applications only Instana has Automation, Context, and Intelligence to see through the complexity and continuous change to provide true insight.