IBM Instana vs. AlertSite

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)
AlertSite
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
AlertSite, from SmartBear Software, is a website monitoring and application performance management application offering real time alerting with root-cause analytics and robust reporting.N/A
Pricing
IBM InstanaAlertSite
Editions & Modules
Essentials
$18
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 InstanaAlertSite
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 InstanaAlertSite
Features
IBM InstanaAlertSite
Application Performance Management
Comparison of Application Performance Management features of Product A and Product B
IBM Instana
-
Ratings
AlertSite
7.6
4 Ratings
2% above category average
Application monitoring00 Ratings8.04 Ratings
Database monitoring00 Ratings6.53 Ratings
Threshold alerts00 Ratings8.04 Ratings
Predictive capabilities00 Ratings7.03 Ratings
Application performance management console00 Ratings7.54 Ratings
Collaboration tools00 Ratings6.02 Ratings
Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications00 Ratings8.04 Ratings
Application dependency mapping and thresholding00 Ratings7.53 Ratings
Virtualization monitoring00 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Server availability and performance monitoring00 Ratings8.54 Ratings
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting00 Ratings8.03 Ratings
IT Asset Discovery00 Ratings7.53 Ratings
Best Alternatives
IBM InstanaAlertSite
Small Businesses
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Score 8.8 out of 10
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic
Score 9.3 out of 10
ManageEngine Site24x7
ManageEngine Site24x7
Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
NetBrain Technologies
NetBrain Technologies
Score 9.2 out of 10
ManageEngine Site24x7
ManageEngine Site24x7
Score 9.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IBM InstanaAlertSite
Likelihood to Recommend
8.1
(48 ratings)
8.0
(4 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(1 ratings)
3.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.2
(3 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
4.5
(1 ratings)
2.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM InstanaAlertSite
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
SmartBear
AlertSite is used in our organization to monitor our website and web applications in real-time to collect the super important metrics reflecting web page load time but from the user end (E2E) and that approaches helps us to understand what our website is experiencing in real-time.
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
SmartBear
  • The Deja-Click Recorder is an excellent tool.
  • Good UI that translates to large NOC screens well.
  • Easy Alerting and Reporting.
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
SmartBear
  • Tool is complicated for Alert creation
  • AlertSite GUI need improvement. As compared to Datadog, it needs improvement in GUI
  • While using AlertSite, many times we faced false alerting, they need to take a look at it to improve performance.
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
SmartBear
Reviewing other cost saving options
Read full review
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
SmartBear
Pretty good product only issue was cost
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
Read full review
SmartBear
I've been unable to contact support after several attempts.
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
SmartBear
We moved all of our services to Site24x7 after several years with AlertSite. We looked at Uptrends and Pingdom to name a few whilst evaluating options. Pingdom lacks functionality and Uptrends we found to have quite a steep learning curve. AlertSites platform and in particular the Deja-Click recorder is a standout tool against the other platforms. Sadly the upscaling costs of multi-location transactions can quickly add up.
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
SmartBear
  • A negative thing is Monitoring locations would have issues and cause false-positive alerts and due to that monitoring team's repetitive work has increased.
  • A positive thing that I have noticed so far is the fact that the AlertSite customers support team is trying to build relationships and go the extra mile to make sure we can overcome any occurring issues and they are quick to respond and provide sufficient guidance for implementing efficiently, and fix products issues.
Read full review
ScreenShots