IBM Instana vs. Sematext Cloud

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Instana
Score 8.2 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)
Sematext Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Sematext Cloud is an observability solution for software-based companies that provides key insights into front-end and back-end performance. Sematext encompasses infrastructure, real user & synthetic monitoring, transaction tracing and log management. Sematext gives businesses full-stack visibility by exposing key performance issues through a single Cloud or On-Premise solution.
$0
per month
Pricing
IBM InstanaSematext Cloud
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)
Logs
$0
per month 500 MB/day, 7 day retention.
Monitoring
$0
per month 5 hosts max, 30 minute retention.
Synthetics
$2
per month per HTTP monitor, 30 day retention.
Experience
$9
per month 25k views/month, 7 day retention.
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM InstanaSematext Cloud
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
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User Ratings
IBM InstanaSematext Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
8.1
(48 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.2
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
4.5
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM InstanaSematext Cloud
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
Sematext
No answers on this topic
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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Sematext
No answers on this topic
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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Sematext
No answers on this topic
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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Sematext
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.
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Sematext
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
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Sematext
No answers on this topic
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.
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Sematext
No answers on this topic
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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Sematext
No answers on this topic
ScreenShots

Sematext Cloud Screenshots

Screenshot of Sematext ExperienceScreenshot of Sematext LogsScreenshot of Sematext MonitoringScreenshot of Sematext SyntheticsScreenshot of Correlate logs and metrics in split view