TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Save this comparison

Save this comparison

Add Product

Recommended Comparisons

    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)

    SolarWinds AppOptics

    Score7.6 out of 10
    N/ASolarWinds AppOptics (formerly Librato) is an IT infrastructure monitoring service and APM, based on technology acquired by SolarWinds with Librato in 2015 to expand its cloud monitoring portfolio.N/A
    Pricing
    IBM InstanaSolarWinds AppOptics
    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 InstanaSolarWinds AppOptics
    Free Trial
    YesYes
    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 InstanaSolarWinds AppOptics
    Considered Both Products
    IBM
    No answer on this topic
    SolarWinds
    Chose SolarWinds AppOptics
    As an early-stage startup, we evaluated the different options on the following parameters: Functionality Monitoring overhead Cost Easy-to-use dashboard AppOptics had most of the features that we needed and offered their services at a reasonable price that made sense for …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    61 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    5 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    53 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    5 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    61 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    5 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    93%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    40 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    96%
    Implementation went as expected
    47 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    IBM InstanaSolarWinds AppOptics
    Monitoring Tasks
    Comparison of Monitoring Tasks features of IBM Instana and SolarWinds AppOptics
    Feature
    IBM Instana
    7.6
    3 Ratings
    9% below category average
    SolarWinds AppOptics
    -
    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 SolarWinds AppOptics
    Feature
    IBM Instana
    5.5
    1 Ratings
    23% below category average
    SolarWinds AppOptics
    -
    Ratings
    Software and hardware inventory6.42 Ratings00 Ratings
    Policy-based automation4.52 Ratings00 Ratings
    Reporting
    Comparison of Reporting features of IBM Instana and SolarWinds AppOptics
    Feature
    IBM Instana
    6.5
    3 Ratings
    20% below category average
    SolarWinds AppOptics
    -
    Ratings
    Performance data reports8.34 Ratings00 Ratings
    Customizable reporting4.52 Ratings00 Ratings
    Data visualization8.83 Ratings00 Ratings
    Risk analysis4.52 Ratings00 Ratings
    Application Performance Management
    Comparison of Application Performance Management features of IBM Instana and SolarWinds AppOptics
    Feature
    IBM Instana
    -
    Ratings
    SolarWinds AppOptics
    6.9
    30 Ratings
    13% below category average
    Application monitoring00 Ratings8.530 Ratings
    Database monitoring00 Ratings7.528 Ratings
    Threshold alerts00 Ratings6.526 Ratings
    Predictive capabilities00 Ratings4.612 Ratings
    Application performance management console00 Ratings7.226 Ratings
    Collaboration tools00 Ratings6.014 Ratings
    Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications00 Ratings6.220 Ratings
    Application dependency mapping and thresholding00 Ratings6.618 Ratings
    Virtualization monitoring00 Ratings7.313 Ratings
    Server availability and performance monitoring00 Ratings8.123 Ratings
    Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting00 Ratings7.316 Ratings
    IT Asset Discovery00 Ratings7.29 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    IBM InstanaSolarWinds AppOptics
    Small Businesses
    Amazon CloudWatch
    Score7.6 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    LogicMonitor
    Score8.9 out of 10
    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Score7.7 out of 10
    Enterprises
    ManageEngine Site24x7
    Score10 out of 10
    Splunk AppDynamics
    Score8.5 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    IBM InstanaSolarWinds AppOptics
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.8
    (60 ratings)
    7.8
    (30 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    Usability
    8.3
    (3 ratings)
    9.6
    (2 ratings)
    Support Rating
    4.5
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    IBM InstanaSolarWinds AppOptics
    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
    SolarWinds
    AppOptics is good for small to medium-sized organizations with less than 150 servers or less than 40 services to monitor. It performs well for this use case where people need to get an overview of application performance, and 95%ile data is okay. Somewhere every data point and every record is critical; it should be avoided.
    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
    SolarWinds
    • Request tracing with code profiling.
    • Automated alerting on latency and response codes for each API.
    • Low resource overhead while collecting data from our application servers.
    • Highly performant dashboard that enables us to make progress rapidly.
    • Very resilient. We have not seen a downtime in their service in the entire year that we have used them.
    • Identify database and cache requests that are taking longer than expected
    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
    SolarWinds
    • The only thing that I would add is the possibility to display every single query our servers receive to eventually analyze them and query through them. We could also generate nice visualizations from that. Right now I believe we can only see averages.
    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
    SolarWinds
    We have been using AppOptics for over 3.5 years and expect to continue to renew it for the foreseeable future
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    As far a usability is concerned for AppOptics, it is just as matter of few minutes away even if you start from scratch, as all you need to do is register on the site and you will get the URL and password. And after this all you have to do is follow the instruction, as per the configuration wizard (tool tip) within the console for various technology such as SQL, IIS, .NET
    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
    SolarWinds
    Solarwinds AppOptics is rated as 9 out of 10 and the reason is there are still few areas where AppOptics needs to improve such as Service Now Integration, GCP Cloud Support, Better Dashboard visualization for application transactions flow. Other than these feature everything is there in AppOptics and that's a reason given 9 points out of 10.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    SolarWinds
    What we found positive in AppOptics from others is:
    • Easy to install and manage.
    • Various stack support.
    • Point to point deep-dive metrics and correlation.
    • Metrics like DB connection, query analysis, latency in API calls, and other connections, response codes for various APIs, etc are the key ones in our case, which AppOptics provides efficiently.
    • Alerts can be sent on different channels.
    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
    SolarWinds
    • Application monitoring troubleshooting became more accurate. Accurate results save more man-hours of manual troubleshooting.
    • As Realtime monitoring and alerts provide more flexibility, downtime can be minimized and Accurate Root causes can be provided.
    • Dashboards can be useful for making future strategy based on trends.
    • Installation and integration is easy.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    SolarWinds AppOptics Screenshots

    Screenshot of AppOptics Home ScreenScreenshot of AppOptics DashboardScreenshot of AppOptics TracesScreenshot of AppOptics Trace Root CauseScreenshot of AppOptics InfrastructureScreenshot of Host Heat Map