IBM Instana vs. Riverbed Aternity

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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)
Riverbed Aternity
Score 5.0 out of 10
N/A
Riverbed Aternity delivers AI-enabled insights based on real end user experience data and high-fidelity telemetry across endpoints, application, infrastructure and network.N/A
Pricing
IBM InstanaRiverbed Aternity
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)
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM InstanaRiverbed Aternity
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM InstanaRiverbed Aternity
Best Alternatives
IBM InstanaRiverbed Aternity
Small Businesses
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Score 8.8 out of 10
SolarWinds Pingdom
SolarWinds Pingdom
Score 9.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic
Score 8.8 out of 10
Cisco ThousandEyes
Cisco ThousandEyes
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
NetBrain Technologies
NetBrain Technologies
Score 9.2 out of 10
Nexthink
Nexthink
Score 7.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IBM InstanaRiverbed Aternity
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(47 ratings)
8.5
(6 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.2
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
4.5
(1 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM InstanaRiverbed Aternity
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Read full review
Riverbed Technology
We are a services organization and we use Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals with our customers. It has allowed us to expand the footprint in the application management business with virtually all of our major accounts. We were able to expand and go into other applications that we weren't in or offering previously. Now, we have a new value proposition for our customer enhanced visibility, enhanced stability, and we can reduce our cost to them because our cost structure is reduced by using Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals.
Read full review
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
Read full review
Riverbed Technology
  • Root cause finding/remediation (it goes beyond analysis).
  • Shows latency between applications and servers.
  • Identifies long-running SQL queries, and puts the onus back on developers to clean up their SQL code.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Riverbed Technology
  • The tool demands High CPU resources to perform monitoring which reduces the overall performance and the user experience is sluggish
  • Also a good amount of training is required to set up the different use cases and monitoring parameters which in return demands a dedicated resource to work on the tool
Read full review
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
Read full review
Riverbed Technology
No answers on this topic
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.
Read full review
Riverbed Technology
No answers on this topic
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
Read full review
Riverbed Technology
The support I give the highest rating because it is really amazing. Every time we triggered the tool support, we were very well served very quickly and efficiently. The problems were solved quickly and without stress. The staff helped us within minutes and had a lot of patience with us
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
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.
Read full review
Riverbed Technology
There is a wide variety of APM solutions out there for companies to pick from. Riverbed AppInternals sits near the top of the stack certainly. We already deploy steelhead units across the estate with client licenses, that aided us in our decision to select AppInternals. We found the costs of AppDynamics and New Relic ( which we had trials for) both costly against AppInternals.
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
Read full review
Riverbed Technology
  • This product has really wonderful features and one of the most valuable ones is the transaction searches into TTW.
  • This will show you the operations that occurred under conditions that the user specifies, giving you the opportunity to drill down on the things that are more important and affecting system performance.
  • Besides that, the capability of analyzing each individual transaction captured to a very low-level detail (method call/line of code). This ability empowers the testing teams to provide more visibility to developers on how they can improve.
Read full review
ScreenShots