IT AI Index
September 2026 Edition · The permanent record of this edition. The unqualified address always carries the latest edition.
Index › IT operations and endpoint › APM › Enterprise › September 2026 Edition

Application performance monitoring for enterprise buyers

Asked as “APM tool”, and as “application performance monitoring solution”, on behalf of an enterprise B2B company. 46 first choices recorded across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts, twelve models each.
Standing
Dynatrace
Clear leader
46% of first choices, clear leader.
ShowinginAll 67 categories in the September 2026 Edition →

By buyer segment

The same question asked on behalf of a different buyer. Each standing is computed within its segment; they sit side by side and are never added together.
Small businessNew Relic51%Clear leaderStanding →Mid-marketNew Relic54%Clear leaderStanding →EnterpriseDynatrace46%Clear leaderThis page

01The standing

Share is the count of first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts, over all twelve models, for an enterprise B2B company. Ordered by share.
ProductFirst-choice shareNegative rateLabelsQuadrant
01Dynatrace46%21%62endorsed leader
02Datadog26%29%58criticized challenger
03New Relic11%12%59accepted challenger
04CubeAPM9%0%10accepted challenger
05AppDynamics2%24%41accepted challenger
Show the three products at 0%, ordered by negative rate
08Elastic APM0%8%12accepted challenger
07IBM Instana0%8%12accepted challenger
06Grafana Cloud0%0%12accepted challenger
Bars are the share of first choices, 0 to 100Every product with at least 10 labels here. Every product name links to its vendor page.
Head to head
New Relic vs SigNozNew Relic vs DatadogSigNoz vs Datadog

Recommended versus criticized

Every product with at least 10 labels here, on both axes. The 30% line names a quadrant, not the verdict above: that one needs more than 40%.

Criticized challengerCriticized default
Negative label rate →
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
Accepted challengerEndorsed leader
0%First-choice share → · lines at 30% share and 25% negative60%
Key
01Dynatrace46%
02Datadog26%
03New Relic11%
04CubeAPM9%
05AppDynamics2%
06Grafana Cloud0%
07IBM Instana0%
08Elastic APM0%

02What they warned about

Four of twelve models held their first choice under the paraphrase. Claude Haiku 4.5, Grok 4.1 Fast, Mistral Small, DeepSeek V4 Flash, Llama 4 Maverick, Qwen 3.7 Flash, GLM 4.7 FlashX and MiniMax M2.5 changed. A high negative share on a product with few labels is a warning. A low share on a product with many labels is salience, not sentiment.
Datadog
29%
17 of 58 labels negative · 9 of 12 models · 2 hard negative
“Notorious for "bill shock": Invoices commonly run 3-12× higher than initial estimates ... Datadog's billing practices and AppDynamics' post-acquisition decline represent the highest current risks” Kimi K2, negative prompt
Dynatrace
21%
13 of 62 labels negative · 8 of 12 models
“it is also noted for being the most expensive commercial APM at scale and having a monolithic agent model that may conflict with teams that want fine-grained control” Llama 4 Maverick, negative prompt
AppDynamics
24%
10 of 41 labels negative · 7 of 12 models · 4 hard negative
“Avoid these if your enterprise is actively migrating to Kubernetes, multi-cloud environments, or serverless workloads.” Gemini 3.5 Flash, negative prompt
New Relic
12%
7 of 59 labels negative · 6 of 12 models
“your seat bill alone will quickly spiral into millions of dollars... However, be aware that forecasting CCUs is more complex” Gemini 3.5 Flash, budget prompt

03What they cite

Citations exist only for the models that return a source list: twelve of the twelve in this edition, and all six flagship models on the expanded tier.

Sites the answers cite

66 of 72 answers in this category came back with a source list, from 12 of 12 models: citations where the model returns them, or the search results it consulted. 5 of those lists are Google grounding redirects that name no site and are left out of the counts. 829 links across 201 sites, every framing counted. Ranked by the number of answers carrying the site or page.

newrelic.com
vendor site · New Relic39 answers · 61 citations · 11 models
cubeapm.com
vendor site · CubeAPM28 answers · 52 citations · 10 models
ardura.consulting
23 answers · 23 citations · 8 models
rollbar.com
vendor site · Rollbar23 answers · 23 citations · 10 models
atatus.com
vendor site · Atatus20 answers · 20 citations · 8 models
manageengine.com
vendor site · ManageEngine18 answers · 22 citations · 7 models
middleware.io
vendor site · Middleware.io18 answers · 20 citations · 8 models
instatus.com
vendor site · Instatus18 answers · 18 citations · 9 models
reveillesoftware.com
18 answers · 18 citations · 9 models
openobserve.ai
vendor site · OpenObserve17 answers · 19 citations · 7 models
performance.qa
14 answers · 16 citations · 6 models
toolradar.com
14 answers · 14 citations · 8 models

Pages the answers cite

The ten pages named in the most answers, by full address. A page here is one the models returned with a recommendation, not one the index endorses.

ardura.consulting/blog/apm-tools-comparison-2026
23 answers · 8 models
cubeapm.com/blog/top-apm-tools-features-pricing-usecases
23 answers · 10 models
newrelic.com/blog/apm/application-performance-monitoring-tools
23 answers · 9 models
newrelic.com/blog/observability/enterprise-apm
23 answers · 10 models
rollbar.com/blog/best-apm-tools
23 answers · 10 models
instatus.com/blog/apm-tools
18 answers · 9 models
middleware.io/blog/apm-tools
18 answers · 8 models
reveillesoftware.com/blog/blog/14-best-application-performance-monitoring-a…
18 answers · 9 models
atatus.com/guides/best-apm-tools-for-enterprises
17 answers · 8 models
openobserve.ai/blog/top-10-apm-tools
16 answers · 7 models

04How they answered

Six framings of the same buying question, each sent to every model in a fresh session with search on. One row per model, so a row shows whether it held its answer under rewording, what it named when cost was the constraint, and what it argued against. Computed from the raw judge labels.
ModelDirect“What is the best APM tool for an enterprise B2B company?”Paraphrase“Which application performance monitoring solution would you recommend to a large B2B company with thousands of employees?”Comparative“What are the top enterprise-grade APM tools and how do they differ?”Budget-constrained“What is the best APM tool for a large company that needs predictable total cost across thousands of users?”Scale-constrained“We are a 5,000 person company with SSO, SOC 2 and procurement review requirements evaluating a APM tool. What should we look at?”Negative“Which APM tools should a large enterprise avoid or be cautious about?”
Claude Haiku 4.5Datadog
Three alternativesAppDynamics, Dynatrace, New Relic
Datadog, DynatraceChanged
One alternativeNew Relic
Datadog, Dynatrace
Three alternativesAppDynamics, New Relic, SolarWinds Observability
Dynatrace
Three alternativesMiddleware.io, New Relic, SigNoz
no first choiceagainst: Dynatrace, LogicMonitor
GPT-5.4 miniDynatrace
Two alternativesDatadog, New Relic
DynatraceHeld
Three alternativesAppDynamics, New Relic, Splunk Observability Cloud
no first choiceDynatrace
One alternativeNew Relic
no first choicenothing named
Gemini 3.5 FlashDynatrace
Four alternativesChronosphere, Datadog, Grafana Labs, New Relic
DynatraceHeld
Three alternativesChronosphere, Datadog, New Relic
Dynatrace
Five alternativesDatadog, Grafana Labs, Honeycomb, New Relic, Splunk
Honeycomb
Three alternativesCoralogix, CubeAPM, SigNoz
against: Datadog, New RelicDynatrace
Two alternativesGrafana Cloud, New Relic
against: Datadogagainst: AppDynamics, Broadcom DX APM, Datadog, ELK, Jaeger, Prometheus, Raygun, Rollbar, Sentry
Perplexity SonarDynatrace
Three alternativesAppDynamics, Datadog, New Relic
DynatraceHeld
Three alternativesAppDynamics, Datadog, IBM Instana
against: ManageEngine Applications ManagerDynatrace
Four alternativesAppDynamics, Datadog, Grafana Cloud, New Relic
CubeAPM
One alternativeMiddleware.io
against: Dynatraceno first choiceagainst: Apache SkyWalking, Datadog, Elastic-based APM setups, New Relic
Grok 4.1 FastDatadog, Dynatrace
Two alternativesAppDynamics, New Relic
against: Elastic, Grafana LabsDynatraceChanged
Two alternativesDatadog, New Relic
Datadog, Dynatrace
Two alternativesAppDynamics, New Relic
against: Grafana, SigNozNew Relic
Two alternativesCubeAPM, SigNoz
against: AppDynamics, Datadog, DynatraceDatadog
Four alternativesAppDynamics, Dynatrace, New Relic, Splunk Observability Cloud
against: AppDynamics, Datadog, Dynatrace, Elastic APM, Grafana/Tempo, Jaeger, New Relic, Prometheus, SigNoz, Zipkin
Mistral SmallDatadog, Dynatrace
Two alternativesAppDynamics, New Relic
no first choiceChangedDatadog
Four alternativesAppDynamics, Dynatrace, Grafana Cloud, New Relic
CubeAPMagainst: AppDynamics, Dynatraceno first choiceagainst: AppDynamics, Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk Observability Cloudagainst: AppDynamics, Dynatrace, New Relic
DeepSeek V4 FlashDatadog
Two alternativesDynatrace, New Relic
Datadog, DynatraceChanged
Three alternativesAppDynamics, New Relic, Splunk
Datadog, Dynatrace
Two alternativesAppDynamics, New Relic
New Relic
One alternativeDynatrace
against: Datadogno first choiceagainst: AppDynamics, Broadcom DX APM, Datadog, Legacy SAP APM / SAP IoT based tools, SolarWinds AppOptics
Llama 4 Maverickno first choiceNew RelicChanged
Four alternativesDatadog, Dynatrace, Elastic APM, IBM Instana
OpenObserve
Seven alternativesAppDynamics, Datadog, Dynatrace, Elastic APM, IBM Instana, New Relic, Sentry
CubeAPMno first choiceagainst: Dynatrace
Qwen 3.7 FlashDatadog, Dynatrace
Two alternativesAppDynamics, New Relic
AppDynamics, DatadogChanged
Two alternativesDynatrace, Grafana Stack
Datadog, Dynatrace
Three alternativesAppDynamics, CubeAPM / OpenTelemetry-Native Solutions, New Relic
CubeAPM
Two alternativesAppDynamics, Dynatrace
against: Datadog, New Relicno first choice
Four alternativesDatadog, Dynatrace, Grafana Cloud / LGTM, New Relic
against: Honeycombagainst: AppDynamics, Elasticsearch, IBM Instana, Rollbar, Sentry, Splunk
Kimi K2Dynatrace
Two alternativesDatadog, New Relic
DynatraceHeld
Two alternativesAppDynamics, New Relic
against: DatadogDatadog, Dynatrace
Four alternativesElastic Observability, Grafana Cloud, New Relic, Splunk AppDynamics / Observability Cloud
New Relic
Two alternativesCubeAPM, groundcover
against: Datadog, DynatraceDatadog
Two alternativesDynatrace, New Relic
against: AppDynamics, Datadog, Dynatrace
GLM 4.7 FlashXDatadog, Dynatrace
Two alternativesGrafana Stack, New Relic
DynatraceChanged
Four alternativesAppDynamics, Datadog, IBM Instana, New Relic
Datadog
Seven alternativesAppDynamics, Dynatrace, Elastic APM, Grafana Cloud, IBM Instana, New Relic, SolarWinds Observability
New Relic
Four alternativesCubeAPM, Grafana Loki, Grafana/Tempo, Prometheus
against: Datadog, Dynatraceno first choiceagainst: AppDynamics, Broadcom DX APM, Datadog, Dynatrace, Nagios, Paessler PRTG, Scout APM, SolarWinds Application Performance Monitor, Zabbix
MiniMax M2.5Datadog APM, Dynatrace
Three alternativesElastic APM, New Relic, Splunk APM
Datadog, DynatraceChanged
One alternativeNew Relic
Dynatrace
Four alternativesAppDynamics, Datadog, IBM Instana, New Relic
Scout APM
Two alternativesCubeAPM, Grafana Cloud
against: Datadog, New Relicno first choiceagainst: Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic
Bold is the first choiceAlternatives are counted; the count opens them.What the answer argued against

05The record

One row per call: the version string exactly as returned, whether the model searched, sources cited, and latency. Full answer text is in the free responses file. Download the record
Seventy-two rows: every prompt, every model, every answer.
PromptModelVersion stringTime (UTC)SearchedSourcesLatency
Direct recommendationClaude Haiku 4.5claude-haiku-4-5-202510012026-09-17 11:58yes97 s
Direct recommendationGPT-5.4 minigpt-5.4-mini-2026-03-172026-09-17 11:02yes45 s
Direct recommendationGemini 3.5 Flashgemini-3.5-flash2026-09-17 09:32yes1536 s
Direct recommendationPerplexity Sonarsonar2026-09-17 14:08yes176 s
Direct recommendationGrok 4.1 Fastspacexai/grok-4.1-fast-non-reasoning via vertex2026-09-17 10:25yes3916 s
Direct recommendationMistral Smallmistral/mistral-small via mistral2026-09-17 12:25yes1512 s
Direct recommendationDeepSeek V4 Flashdeepseek/deepseek-v4-flash via fireworks2026-09-17 13:13yes1317 s
Direct recommendationLlama 4 Maverickmeta/llama-4-maverick via bedrock2026-09-17 11:02yes53 s
Direct recommendationQwen 3.7 Flashalibaba/qwen3.7-flash via alibaba2026-09-17 11:16yes519 s
Direct recommendationKimi K2moonshotai/kimi-k2 via novita2026-09-17 12:31yes1331 s
Direct recommendationGLM 4.7 FlashXzai/glm-4.7-flashx via zai2026-09-17 13:32yes2165 s
Direct recommendationMiniMax M2.5minimax/minimax-m2.5 via minimax2026-09-17 10:51yes719 s
ParaphraseClaude Haiku 4.5claude-haiku-4-5-202510012026-09-17 09:35yes98 s
ParaphraseGPT-5.4 minigpt-5.4-mini-2026-03-172026-09-17 12:59yes34 s
ParaphraseGemini 3.5 Flashgemini-3.5-flash2026-09-17 10:35yes1526 s
ParaphrasePerplexity Sonarsonar2026-09-17 09:34yes208 s
ParaphraseGrok 4.1 Fastspacexai/grok-4.1-fast-non-reasoning via vertex2026-09-17 09:44yes3214 s
ParaphraseMistral Smallmistral/mistral-small via mistral2026-09-17 13:15no03 s
ParaphraseDeepSeek V4 Flashdeepseek/deepseek-v4-flash via fireworks2026-09-17 12:36yes1017 s
ParaphraseLlama 4 Maverickmeta/llama-4-maverick via bedrock2026-09-17 12:37yes52 s
ParaphraseQwen 3.7 Flashalibaba/qwen3.7-flash via alibaba2026-09-17 09:53no043 s
ParaphraseKimi K2moonshotai/kimi-k2 via novita2026-09-17 13:48yes1425 s
ParaphraseGLM 4.7 FlashXzai/glm-4.7-flashx via zai2026-09-17 10:15yes862 s
ParaphraseMiniMax M2.5minimax/minimax-m2.5 via minimax2026-09-17 12:37yes525 s
ComparativeClaude Haiku 4.5claude-haiku-4-5-202510012026-09-17 12:19yes1410 s
ComparativeGPT-5.4 minigpt-5.4-mini-2026-03-172026-09-17 13:47yes59 s
ComparativeGemini 3.5 Flashgemini-3.5-flash2026-09-17 12:23yes2227 s
ComparativePerplexity Sonarsonar2026-09-17 10:42yes2010 s
ComparativeGrok 4.1 Fastspacexai/grok-4.1-fast-non-reasoning via vertex2026-09-17 13:21yes2219 s
ComparativeMistral Smallmistral/mistral-small via mistral2026-09-17 11:14yes57 s
ComparativeDeepSeek V4 Flashdeepseek/deepseek-v4-flash via fireworks2026-09-17 10:00yes1917 s
ComparativeLlama 4 Maverickmeta/llama-4-maverick via bedrock2026-09-17 10:21yes53 s
ComparativeQwen 3.7 Flashalibaba/qwen3.7-flash via alibaba2026-09-17 13:29yes523 s
ComparativeKimi K2moonshotai/kimi-k2 via novita2026-09-17 13:40yes1431 s
ComparativeGLM 4.7 FlashXzai/glm-4.7-flashx via zai2026-09-17 09:50yes14177 s
ComparativeMiniMax M2.5minimax/minimax-m2.5 via minimax2026-09-17 14:11yes518 s
Budget constrainedClaude Haiku 4.5claude-haiku-4-5-202510012026-09-17 11:06yes1711 s
Budget constrainedGPT-5.4 minigpt-5.4-mini-2026-03-172026-09-17 10:08yes35 s
Budget constrainedGemini 3.5 Flashgemini-3.5-flash2026-09-17 09:45yes21104 s
Budget constrainedPerplexity Sonarsonar2026-09-17 11:09yes166 s
Budget constrainedGrok 4.1 Fastspacexai/grok-4.1-fast-non-reasoning via vertex2026-09-17 09:38yes4217 s
Budget constrainedMistral Smallmistral/mistral-small via mistral2026-09-17 11:53yes54 s
Budget constrainedDeepSeek V4 Flashdeepseek/deepseek-v4-flash via fireworks2026-09-17 11:35yes1014 s
Budget constrainedLlama 4 Maverickmeta/llama-4-maverick via bedrock2026-09-17 12:50yes53 s
Budget constrainedQwen 3.7 Flashalibaba/qwen3.7-flash via alibaba2026-09-17 12:25yes549 s
Budget constrainedKimi K2moonshotai/kimi-k2 via novita2026-09-17 12:48yes1021 s
Budget constrainedGLM 4.7 FlashXzai/glm-4.7-flashx via zai2026-09-17 14:01yes22200 s
Budget constrainedMiniMax M2.5minimax/minimax-m2.5 via minimax2026-09-17 13:50yes1251 s
Scale constrainedClaude Haiku 4.5claude-haiku-4-5-202510012026-09-17 12:03yes1816 s
Scale constrainedGPT-5.4 minigpt-5.4-mini-2026-03-172026-09-17 11:13no08 s
Scale constrainedGemini 3.5 Flashgemini-3.5-flash2026-09-17 11:07no014 s
Scale constrainedPerplexity Sonarsonar2026-09-17 11:25yes208 s
Scale constrainedGrok 4.1 Fastspacexai/grok-4.1-fast-non-reasoning via vertex2026-09-17 12:45yes2414 s
Scale constrainedMistral Smallmistral/mistral-small via mistral2026-09-17 11:26no09 s
Scale constrainedDeepSeek V4 Flashdeepseek/deepseek-v4-flash via fireworks2026-09-17 11:17yes920 s
Scale constrainedLlama 4 Maverickmeta/llama-4-maverick via bedrock2026-09-17 14:03yes53 s
Scale constrainedQwen 3.7 Flashalibaba/qwen3.7-flash via alibaba2026-09-17 13:26yes1049 s
Scale constrainedKimi K2moonshotai/kimi-k2 via novita2026-09-17 13:38yes2336 s
Scale constrainedGLM 4.7 FlashXzai/glm-4.7-flashx via zai2026-09-17 12:20yes10185 s
Scale constrainedMiniMax M2.5minimax/minimax-m2.5 via minimax2026-09-17 12:41yes721 s
Negative framingClaude Haiku 4.5claude-haiku-4-5-202510012026-09-17 09:46yes188 s
Negative framingGPT-5.4 minigpt-5.4-mini-2026-03-172026-09-17 13:59yes512 s
Negative framingGemini 3.5 Flashgemini-3.5-flash2026-09-17 11:58yes1625 s
Negative framingPerplexity Sonarsonar2026-09-17 10:12yes208 s
Negative framingGrok 4.1 Fastspacexai/grok-4.1-fast-non-reasoning via vertex2026-09-17 12:03yes2817 s
Negative framingMistral Smallmistral/mistral-small via mistral2026-09-17 13:18yes56 s
Negative framingDeepSeek V4 Flashdeepseek/deepseek-v4-flash via fireworks2026-09-17 13:17yes2733 s
Negative framingLlama 4 Maverickmeta/llama-4-maverick via bedrock2026-09-17 13:29yes53 s
Negative framingQwen 3.7 Flashalibaba/qwen3.7-flash via alibaba2026-09-17 10:12no050 s
Negative framingKimi K2moonshotai/kimi-k2 via novita2026-09-17 11:09yes2939 s
Negative framingGLM 4.7 FlashXzai/glm-4.7-flashx via zai2026-09-17 12:00yes23455 s
Negative framingMiniMax M2.5minimax/minimax-m2.5 via minimax2026-09-17 11:19yes1440 s

Normalization in this category

Every judgment call made between the raw labels and the numbers above, listed so it is visible and reversible.

Category-scoped readings
Cisco AppDynamics read as AppDynamics
Unresolved, counted raw
AWS managed services
CubeAPM / OpenTelemetry-Native Solutions
Elastic-based APM setups
Legacy SAP APM / SAP IoT based tools
SolarWinds Application Performance Monitor
Splunk AppDynamics / Observability Cloud
Discontinued, still offered
No shut-down product was recommended here.

Also in it operations and endpoint

The other categories of this function, with the leader in each.
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