Likelihood to Recommend I would recommend IBM Instana based on its strengths in automating application performance monitoring, dynamic tracing, and its ability to handle modern, containerized environments effectively. The automatic discovery and mapping feature, along with AI-powered anomaly detection, provide valuable insights for proactive issue resolution. However, I would consider factors such as the organization's specific technology stack, scalability requirements, and budget constraints. Conducting a thorough evaluation, including a trial or proof of concept, would be essential to ensure that IBM Instana aligns with our unique needs and contributes positively to our technology and business objectives.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Collecting Kubernetes and Infra level logs and presenting in easy to understand visuals. Tracing the end-to-end journey of an event and also categorizing by technology and Endpoints Built-in and custom alerts help to monitor almost all of scenarios without much additional configuration. Ability to create Applications to logical group important flows Read full review 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 Read full review Cons I believe that the "live" option in monitoring does not truly update the status in real-time, thus I must manually update to feel comfortable. The call analysis tool might be improved, third-party resources are restricted, and the pricing is slightly more than competitors in comparable categories. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We have been using AppOptics for over 3.5 years and expect to continue to renew it for the foreseeable future
Read full review Usability 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
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We chose IBM Instana for several reasons, and the most important one is that we didn't have to make changes in our code for nearly all of our applications for it to work. We are happy with the decision we made to use IBM Instana.
Read full review 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. Read full review Return on Investment System down time is shortened as our ability to troubleshoot issues goes up. Potential downtime is stopped as we are able to slow down calls/ availability of calls in response to monitoring the dashboard. We are able to react to issues quickly through the smart alert system rather than manual checks. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots SolarWinds AppOptics Screenshots