# Application performance monitoring: what AI models recommend, September 2026

IT AI Recommendation Index, September 2026 Edition. Asked as "APM tool" and as "application performance monitoring solution", six framings each, to twelve models with search on, on behalf of a mid-market B2B company. Page: https://it-ai-index.com/operations/application-performance-monitoring/

**Standing:** New Relic leads with 54% of first choices; verdict clear leader. 46 first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts.

## First-choice share

| # | Product | Share | Negative rate | Labels |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | New Relic | 54% | 15% | 67 |
| 2 | SigNoz | 13% | 4% | 23 |
| 3 | Datadog | 11% | 37% | 62 |
| 4 | Grafana Cloud | 4% | 0% | 24 |
| 5 | IBM Instana | 2% | 7% | 14 |
| 6 | Honeycomb | 2% | 9% | 11 |
| 7 | Sentry | 0% | 0% | 14 |
| 8 | Elastic APM | 0% | 0% | 13 |
| 9 | AppDynamics | 0% | 27% | 26 |
| 10 | Dynatrace | 0% | 42% | 45 |

## Each model's first choice on the direct prompt

- Claude Haiku 4.5: no first choice
- GPT-5.4 mini: New Relic; alternatives AppDynamics, Datadog, Dynatrace, Grafana Cloud
- Gemini 3.5 Flash: New Relic; alternatives Honeycomb, Sentry
- Perplexity Sonar: New Relic; alternatives Datadog, Dynatrace, ManageEngine Applications Manager / OpManager Nexus
- Grok 4.1 Fast: New Relic; alternatives Datadog, ManageEngine Applications Manager, SolarWinds
- Mistral Small: New Relic; alternatives Datadog
- DeepSeek V4 Flash: New Relic; alternatives ManageEngine Applications Manager
- Llama 4 Maverick: no first choice
- Qwen 3.7 Flash: Datadog; alternatives IBM Instana, New Relic, Sentry
- Kimi K2: New Relic; alternatives ManageEngine Applications Manager, SolarWinds
- GLM 4.7 FlashX: New Relic; alternatives AppDynamics, Datadog, Grafana/Tempo, OpenObserve
- MiniMax M2.5: ManageEngine Applications Manager, SolarWinds APM; alternatives Pandora FMS

## Sources the answers cite

63 of 72 answers came back with a source list, from 12 of 12 models. Sites named in the most answers:

- newrelic.com: 26 answers, 40 citations
- manageengine.com: 26 answers, 30 citations
- reveillesoftware.com: 26 answers, 26 citations
- g2.com: 24 answers, 49 citations
- cubeapm.com: 24 answers, 27 citations
- openobserve.ai: 21 answers, 24 citations
- rollbar.com: 21 answers, 21 citations
- instatus.com: 20 answers, 20 citations

Pages named in the most answers:

- https://reveillesoftware.com/blog/blog/14-best-application-performance-monitoring-apm-tools-2024 (26 answers)
- https://rollbar.com/blog/best-apm-tools (21 answers)
- https://instatus.com/blog/apm-tools (20 answers)
- https://cubeapm.com/blog/top-apm-tools-features-pricing-usecases (17 answers)
- https://openobserve.ai/blog/top-10-apm-tools (17 answers)
- https://newrelic.com/blog/apm/application-performance-monitoring-tools (16 answers)
- https://toolradar.com/guides/best-application-monitoring-tools (16 answers)
- https://ardura.consulting/blog/apm-tools-comparison-2026 (15 answers)
- https://manageengine.com/it-operations-management/application-observability/apm-tools-comparison.html (15 answers)
- https://motadata.com/blog/best-apm-tools (15 answers)

## Warned against

- Datadog: 23 of 62 labels negative. "High Caution: Major Commercial APM Vendors ... Unpredictable pricing - Bills can triple or quadruple at scale" (Kimi K2, negative prompt)
- Dynatrace: 19 of 45 labels negative. "Most expensive at scale among commercial APMs ... Memory-based pricing makes bills unpredictable" (Kimi K2, negative prompt)
- New Relic: 10 of 67 labels negative. "Pricing model confusion ... Stability concerns - users report "laughable" stability in some regions" (Kimi K2, negative prompt)
- AppDynamics: 7 of 26 labels negative. "Scalability issues - doesn't scale well; requires multiple controllers that don't communicate" (Kimi K2, negative prompt)

## Record

- Method: https://it-ai-index.com/methodology/
- Raw judge labels and full responses: https://it-ai-index.com/data/
- License: CC BY 4.0. Cite as IT AI Recommendation Index, September 2026 Edition, it-ai-index.com.