Ask HN: How is your backend instrumented?

Was using datadog's APM to track the transactions and our API usage. But because we are using GC AppEngine, we had to use a workaround by installing the agent on a separate VM. Then we found out that we will have to pay for APM and that VM too, not just APM, so we left it.

We tried newrelic before, it was good, but datadog seemed like a complete solution (and has better design).

Actually I am surprised that there is no high quality open source APM.

We use instana.io. It's UI is clunky but gets the job done. It allowed us to troubleshoot multiple severe bugs in production which would have been hard to solve otherwise.