IBM Instana vs. New Relic

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.

Incentivized

I have used New Relic in different scenarios like monitoring my production infrastructure and applications which helps us to reduce the downtime of my applications and websites and also I have used the synthetic monitoring feature which helps to proactively monitor our websites availability. Along with this I have also used New Relic for cloud resources cost monitoring which helps to reduce my cloud cost. Also I have used mobile application monitoring which helps me to trace the sessions easily and I can easily reduce my RCA through the help of that.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• New Relic APM allows us to follow up transactions across services and trace performance bottlenecks in real-time, crucial when monitoring the processing of energy loads or predictive maintenance algorithms.
• It gives us deep visibility into our cloud servers, containers and IOT gateways, so we can catch CPU spikes or memory leaks which can impact the data we ingest from the field devices.
• We develop custom dashboards for monitoring trends of power consumption, abnormality in sensors and API health. In conjunction with alerting, it makes sure we are fixing issues before customers even see them.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Support for SQL like query with more functional features of analysis while viewing distributed tracing.
• support for very low level specific integration from APIs to classes to functions to piece of code
• More detailed documentation, as we faced issues while integrating for the first time.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

The only issue that we have had with New Relic is that the price might be a little expensive for smaller companies. The amount of data you store in New Relic impacts the cost, and can get away from you if you don't work closely with the vendor. Overall though the application is top notch.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I have given this much rating as I am used New Relic in different sectors and for different use cases like its K8s monitoring, infra monitoring, full stack monitoring as compare to other tools New Relic gives data in a formatted and connected way, and also it is giving us value for money. It also launches new features day by day which helps users to track the issue very quickly. It also supports OTel integrations which is the latest trend of observability tools. thats why I had given this much rating to New Relic.

Incentivized

Never observed an outage

Incentivized

there are times where browser cache will cause issues that require you to clear your browser before continuing.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

The support team has been really helpful and resolved most of the issues on time. However, for a couple of issues, several follow-ups were needed to elicit a reasonable response. The issue was deeply technical and could have been investigated only by their Architects, and bringing them into the ticket took longer than needed

Incentivized

It's better to start by implementing New Relic in one project and test everything. Try to follow best recommended practices and read all the official documentation. Everything seems well tested. Then, start by installing agents to the rest of your projects and keep a close look to all logs and metrics New Relic gives you.

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.

Incentivized

New Relic has full stack visibility and gives us all options for observability like one stop shop. It gives you front end, backend as well synthetic monitoring capabilities. Every other feature built into one cost model (usually) which ties to data that you send, it helps you leverage all features without having to pay additional charge for feature

Incentivized

Agent deployment is easily integrated into our workflow. Adding the agent to new servers is quick and painless

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• We were able to quickly identify our most time consuming APIs. In some cases we were able to bring down times for some apis from 4s to 200ms.
• We were able to identify our slowest database queries and optimize them for quicker response times.

Incentivized