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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    IBM Instana

    Score7.8 out of 10
    N/AInstana, 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)

    Sentry

    Score8.8 out of 10
    N/ASentry provides engineering teams with tools to detect and solve user-impacting bugs and other issues.

    $26

    per month

    Pricing
    IBM InstanaSentry
    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)
    Team
    $26
    per month
    Business
    $80
    per month
    Developer
    Free
    Enterprise
    Contact sales team
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    IBM InstanaSentry
    Free Trial
    YesYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    IBM InstanaSentry
    Considered Both Products
    IBM
    Chose IBM Instana
    Instana is better at call tracing than the previous ones and is cost effective as well. But AppD can do a better job at constructing customised metrics, alert profiles and alert conditions as well, but it misses a lot of important details while tracing a call. At the same time, …
    Incentivized
    Sentry
    Chose Sentry
    Both AppD and Instana are a superset of sentry the majority of the time. Sentry is specialised in error tracking does the best in it, but the other too mentioned does a similar job along with multiple other monitoring features. Also, sampling of data is best in Instana, and is …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    61 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    10 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    53 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    8 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    61 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    10 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    93%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    40 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    5 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    96%
    Implementation went as expected
    47 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    10 Answers
    Features
    IBM InstanaSentry
    Monitoring Tasks
    Comparison of Monitoring Tasks features of IBM Instana and Sentry
    Feature
    IBM Instana
    7.6
    3 Ratings
    9% below category average
    Sentry
    -
    Ratings
    Remote monitoring9.14 Ratings00 Ratings
    Network device monitoring5.54 Ratings00 Ratings
    Multiple Server Monitoring8.94 Ratings00 Ratings
    Multi-device monitoring5.54 Ratings00 Ratings
    Automated alerts and notifications9.14 Ratings00 Ratings
    Management Tasks
    Comparison of Management Tasks features of IBM Instana and Sentry
    Feature
    IBM Instana
    5.5
    1 Ratings
    23% below category average
    Sentry
    -
    Ratings
    Software and hardware inventory6.42 Ratings00 Ratings
    Policy-based automation4.52 Ratings00 Ratings
    Reporting
    Comparison of Reporting features of IBM Instana and Sentry
    Feature
    IBM Instana
    6.5
    3 Ratings
    20% below category average
    Sentry
    -
    Ratings
    Performance data reports8.34 Ratings00 Ratings
    Customizable reporting4.52 Ratings00 Ratings
    Data visualization8.83 Ratings00 Ratings
    Risk analysis4.52 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    IBM InstanaSentry
    Small Businesses
    Amazon CloudWatch
    Score7.8 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    LogicMonitor
    Score8.9 out of 10
    Airbrake
    Score8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    ManageEngine Site24x7
    Score10 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    IBM InstanaSentry
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.8
    (60 ratings)
    9.0
    (15 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Usability
    8.3
    (3 ratings)
    8.0
    (3 ratings)
    Support Rating
    4.5
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    IBM InstanaSentry
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Sentry
    Great for standard web application performance monitoring, analytics and error reporting. Shows line level code errors, gives insight into performance issues (plugins, API issues, etc.). Automation and scheduled scanning in production gives client visibility into 'after deployment' value. Also lets a relatively small number of developers keep tabs on a handful of different site/applications without needing a bunch of tools. The UI is pretty complicated and can be overwhelming for new users. Documentation could be better for the learning curve,
    Incentivized
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Sentry
    • Great web interface. Lots of data available in a really clean format, with filtering options and more.
    • Per-user exception tracking. User is complaining about something being broken? Look up their account ID in Sentry and you can see if they've run into any exceptions (with device information included, of course).
    • Source map uploading. Took a little while to figure this out but now we have our deploy script upload sourcemaps to Sentry on each deployment, meaning we get to see stack traces that aren't obfuscated!
    • Very generous free tier – 10,000 events per month. We're nowhere near that yet.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Sentry
    • Alert Configuration. Would be really helpful to have multiple logical groupings within the "If" section of a single configurable alert.
    • Alert Copying. Being able to copy an alert from one project to another would be super beneficial.
    • Alert Tags. Better UI around how we select which tags are getting sent with each alert instead of a tiny text box.
    Incentivized
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Sentry
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Sentry
    Its incredibly versatile, but that leads to complexity for the uninitiated, which can be intimidating. Nevertheless its a well polished product, in our case leading to only using it for a focus on frontend is still more cost effective than buying a one-to-rule-them-all tool...
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Sentry
    No answers on this topic
    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
    Sentry
    It is cheaper and offers better support for front-end applications for enterprise large environments with more then 30 scrum teams and hundreds of micro frontend applications. The configuration options, both with the agent and from the user interface, are superior to other tools, and the documentation is also very easy to use.
    Incentivized
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Sentry
    • So it has helped us for quick error resolutions.
    • From dashboard we are able to assign errors to particular member and see when its resolved.
    • Without customer informing us about errors we know what happened in real time helps in customer service also.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots