Sometimes it is. I was heavily involved with a decision between Datadog vs New Relic (plus a few others) at a former "unicorn" startup. We definitely did not want to run the server-side ourselves, but having the client libraries be open source was a major advantage for Datadog. It let us extend them to support our very old Django version and homegrown SOA framework

I've had some success convincing anti-cloud (cloud reticent?) companies by pointing to things like FedRAMP compliance: "You know how hard it is to get ______ compliance? Your data is probably safer there..." kind of conversations.

I'm sure your mileage will vary but in my not so humble opinion companies that are still trying to cling to their aging fleet of servers are making pretty poor business decisions. I think this internet stuff is catching on.

- I work at NR, these questionable opinions are mine and not those of my employer though I might have stolen them from my friend Vicky who yells about software a lot. Don't buy stock because I typed some words on a webpage that's ridiculous, also maybe don't buy stock period. Buy bitcoin it's the new pet rocks.

Maybe Elastic APM fits your need? It works well on-prem as well as on the Elastic hosted offering and you can get started for free.

Disclosure: I work for Elastic

Why do you care about where the server is? Is it because of privacy/ data regulation requirements?

Won't running servers in house be a cumbersome task

Dynatrace and AppDynamics are available as on-premise APM solutions, a bit on the expensive side though!