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)
Scout Monitoring
Score 10.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Scout APM is offered to enable software developers to spend their time building products customers love by minimizing the effort required to identify and resolve performance issues. As a provider of Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools, Scout states that their developer-centric approach pinpoints issues such as memory bloat, N+1 queries and other abnormalities, enabling customers to quickly resolve performance issues.
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.
To me, it's the best APM out there for a Rails application. It is really easy to set up, configure and start debugging any kind of bad-performing endpoint. We have solved issues going from High Response Time to Memory Leaks/Bloats. All of this can be achieved even if you are hosting your app in a PaaS like Heroku. (Where sometimes is difficult to install an agent like in other vendors).
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
I specifically use the risk assessment module and do risk assessments on any new product we introduce into our network or any company that we are thinking about taking on as a client.
I also use the vendor management module for any due diligence that comes up with a new company or a company that we may use once and then not use again.
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.
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
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.
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.
I've already explained why this product beats Excel hands down in time and money. I also love the way it sends you an email when you forget any due diligence or testing that needs to be done.
