Elastic Observability vs. IBM Instana

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Elastic Observability
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Elastic Observability, from Elastic, the makers of Elasticsearch, is a solution that aims to bring logs, metrics, and APM based on the former Opbeat (acquired by Elastic in 2017) traces together at scale in a single stack so users can monitor and react to events happening anywhere in an IT environment. It's free and open to start, and adds the Logs, Metrics, APM (formerly Opbeat), and Uptime modules to the Elastic (ELK) Stack.N/A
IBM Instana
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Instana, an IBM company since the December 2020 acquisition, provides APM services for SOA, microservices, containerized applications and Kubernetes, and cloud native applications, as well as discovery and monitoring for IT assets.
$75
per month per Managed Virtual Server (MVS)
Pricing
Elastic ObservabilityIBM Instana
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Essentials
$18
per month per Managed Virtual Server (MVS)
Standard
$75
per month per Managed Virtual Server (MVS)
Self-Hosted
$93.80
per month per Managed Virtual Server (MVS)
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Elastic ObservabilityIBM Instana
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Elastic ObservabilityIBM Instana
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User Ratings
Elastic ObservabilityIBM Instana
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(4 ratings)
8.1
(48 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
4.5
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Elastic ObservabilityIBM Instana
Likelihood to Recommend
Elastic
We can use this Elastic Observability in our business problems such as Creating internal/operational efficiencies issues, customer relations/service, and business process outcomes issues. This product has a lot of features for the above problems. But this product may be having some issues when charting purposes. But it can adjust for that purpose.
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IBM
With enterprise IT assets in a multitude of ecosystems, cloud infrastructures and sometimes still left stuck in a legacy on prem architecture, IBM Instana makes it easy to get the right data to drive development and / or DevSecOps processes with tangible input from the target environment itself.
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Pros
Elastic
  • Open source code base
  • Community support
  • Is fast in processing
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IBM
  • Can monitor application(s) and system(s) with very large throughput of transactions by the second ( it gets everything !!!)
  • Provide strong drill down for your applications and will tell you where the points of failure of an application's is ( servers , network , Databases , etc you name it )
  • Very easy to set up and have it up and running when using the SaaS solution. There's an on premise solution which works just as well but requires more effort and preparation from an infrastructure point of view for your teams to implement.
  • Continuously improve their features and their agents auto-update and keep up. All while not interfering with your applications.
  • Let's you create your own dashboards and visualizations that can be tailored for different kind of users with the data collected.
  • Create your own events and smart alerts so you can know on the spot if something is happening or is likely to happen that needs addressing on your applications / systems
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Cons
Elastic
  • Difficult to setup/maintain
  • Search pattern bar could be more user-friendly
  • Premium subscription features are very expensive
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IBM
  • It's very difficult to create custom dashboards, only a handful of scenarios can be visualized to dashboards.
  • Extracting information from Instana to further analysis into excel for example is something that can be improved. Using an API to get data is very limiting.
  • Open telemetry features which allow to send application data to Instana is not working as documented.
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Likelihood to Renew
Elastic
No answers on this topic
IBM
Instana has been able to fulfill our all requirement and provide out of box solution for multiple component like AWS RDS Monitoring and real time alerting setup on basis of that. it is also easy to integrate with other open-source alerting and monitoring tools which makes it easier to incorporate into our solutions
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Usability
Elastic
No answers on this topic
IBM
IBM Instana totally alters our monitoring approach since it increases the stability of the system and simplifies the process of problem solving. And since it helps to lower the degree of alert exhaustion that we experience, it is a total game changer for us.
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Support Rating
Elastic
No answers on this topic
IBM
IBM instana support team is good but when we ask them for support, they keep asking same thing again and again and mostly there is no solution
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Alternatives Considered
Elastic
Splunk is a very good product but the licensing costs are high; we utilise the best of both worlds by using both products for slightly different purposes. We put the voluminous data with simple use cases in Elastic where it doesn't cost too much and can be searched quickly while putting the less voluminous data with more complex use cases in Splunk so we can take advantage of Splunk's very comprehensive but often much slower SPL search query language
Read full review
IBM
As a DevOps engineer, I've explored various Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools, including New Relic for real-time insights, AppDynamics for code-level visibility, Dynatrace for AI-driven monitoring, Datadog for comprehensive observability, Splunk for log management, Stackify Retrace for error tracking, and Raygun for crash reporting. Each tool offers distinct features, and the choice depends on specific use cases, technology stacks, and organizational needs. Thorough evaluations, considering factors like ease of use, integration capabilities, and scalability, help in selecting the most suitable APM solution for effective application monitoring in a DevOps environment.
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Return on Investment
Elastic
  • Cost management.
  • Good customer increment.
  • Time management.
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IBM
  • Increase up time by early failure identification and performance optimization based on findings in Instana.
  • Enhance user experience by mapping user issues with backend failures
  • Automated actions help fixing known issues without human intervention
  • increase support team efficiency by root cause analysis which decrease the incident solving time
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ScreenShots