IBM Instana

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Instana
Score 7.9 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
IBM Instana
Editions & Modules
Essentials
$20
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
IBM Instana
Free Trial
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM Instana
Considered Both Products
IBM Instana
Chose IBM Instana
IBM Instana is a modern Observability solution that works on the concept of a single agent, no matter how many entities are being monitored behind the single agent; eg, operating system, database, application or logs. The pricing metrics are very transparent and predictable, it …
Chose IBM Instana
I used Log Analysis before, and as my last response: Log analysis didn't provide dashboard metrics with as much information as Instana, so this is something that
Chose IBM Instana
IBM Instana provides automated discovery without manual configuration. It provides granular (per sec) data collection. It's easy to set up and supports on-Premises as well as cloud environments. It can be integrated with other tools, increasing its capability for advanced …
Chose IBM Instana
Instana is much more robust and modern compared to our previous product which was AppDynamics. We compared Dynatrace and Datadog and they were very similar in many aspects. The licensing simplicity with Instana and our existing relationship with IBM made it a much more enticing …
Chose IBM Instana
we migrated from another competitor solution as Instana was able to do 2 things differently for us - i.e., 1. we were able to get a complete landscape view of the application including its dependency and inter-connections as well as the underlying infrastructure it runs on 2. …
Chose IBM Instana
Instana won because of the zero-config auto-discovery and fast root cause analysis in complex, ephemeral environments.
Chose IBM Instana
Unlike the above-mentioned platforms, IBM Instana's real-time observability and multiple Cloud Application performance monitoring options are a productive, very impressive solution for tracing and detecting performance issues. Its root cause analytics production is a wonderful …
Chose IBM Instana
We chose IBM Instana for its very affordable price, the ease of use of the solution, which was perfectly suited to our needs and specifications, and the feedback from our teams, who had no trouble getting to grips with it in a very short time.The IBM Instana solution is very …
Chose IBM Instana
IBM Instana is the first of its kind we have deployed
Chose IBM Instana
In my opinion, IBM Instana is great for infrastructure monitoring while AppDynamics is ahead in application monitoring
Chose IBM Instana
IBM Instana provides 60 seconds granularity whereas the other products use time series data
IBM Instana automatically detects the Service Endpoints which helps us trace all the calls pinpointed to service endpoints.
IBM Instana provides complete Auto Discovery with no …
Chose IBM Instana
Well again, it comes back to the application monitor. It does a better job than SolarWinds.
Chose IBM Instana
Automatic application discovery with one agent installation instead of manual configuration for each application and multiply agents for each technology stack.

Automatic tracing for application calls without the need to add complex configuration and application instrumentation.
Chose IBM Instana
The primary reason we choose IBM Instana was that is was compatible with nearly all of our apps without requiring any modifications to our code. We are really happy that we decided to adopt IBM Instana.
Chose IBM Instana
1- ROI is higher as the budget is much less than other
2- the way of calculating license is much better and fit us and this affect the ROI
3- the ease of implementation
Chose IBM Instana
IBM Instana was an easier setup and to manage. However, we are still using Grafana and Prometheus to monitor Kafka.
Chose IBM Instana
New Relic has it's own perks but when it comes to large infrastructure, we always face some issue at stability but IBM Instana never fails here. In my opinion, Inbuilt dashboard and inbuilt alerting feature what makes IBM Instana better than compared to other tools. I think …
Features
IBM Instana
Monitoring Tasks
Comparison of Monitoring Tasks features of Product A and Product B
IBM Instana
7.6
3 Ratings
11% below category average
Remote monitoring9.14 Ratings
Network device monitoring5.54 Ratings
Multiple Server Monitoring8.94 Ratings
Multi-device monitoring5.54 Ratings
Automated alerts and notifications9.14 Ratings
Management Tasks
Comparison of Management Tasks features of Product A and Product B
IBM Instana
5.5
1 Ratings
23% below category average
Software and hardware inventory6.42 Ratings
Policy-based automation4.52 Ratings
Reporting
Comparison of Reporting features of Product A and Product B
IBM Instana
6.5
3 Ratings
20% below category average
Performance data reports8.34 Ratings
Customizable reporting4.52 Ratings
Data visualization8.83 Ratings
Risk analysis4.52 Ratings
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IBM Instana
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Enterprises
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User Ratings
IBM Instana
Likelihood to Recommend
7.8
(60 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
4.5
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM Instana
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM
Well-suited for an org with a large application base, where many microservices are created and destroyed daily. IBM Instana doesn't require any manual configuration, so deploying the Instana agents takes very little time. Data capture from IBM Instana is highly granular and can detect even short spikes lasting a few seconds. Not suitable for legacy applications where there will be rarely any changes. They can use a simpler monitoring mechanism. Also, highly dense data capturing can sometimes overload the information.
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Pros
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
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
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
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
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
IBM
Instana is much more robust and modern compared to our previous product which was AppDynamics. We compared Dynatrace and Datadog and they were very similar in many aspects. The licensing simplicity with Instana and our existing relationship with IBM made it a much more enticing option and accelerated the adoption timeline
Read full review
Return on Investment
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