IBM Instana vs. SolarWinds Observability

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)
SolarWinds Observability
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds Observability is a SaaS offering purpose-built to enable DevOps teams to have unified and correlated end-to-end visibility across the technology stack, from the infrastructure, database and application to the end-user experience. It helps organizations meet service-level agreements (SLAs) and user satisfaction service-level objectives (SLOs). The observability offering helps make it easy to understand and has holistic oversight into service delivery and the individual component…
$60
per year 1 gb at starting at 1 day retention (more retention options*)
Pricing
IBM InstanaSolarWinds Observability
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
$60
per year 1 gb at starting at 1 day retention (more retention options*)
Digital Experience Observability - Synthetics
$120
per year Packs of 10 uptime checks
Infrastructure Observability
$180
per year Per Host (Containers 10:1 Host)
Network Observability
$180
per year Per active network device (With an IP address)
Application Observability
$330
per year Application Instance
Database Observability
$840
per year Per physical or virtual database instance
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM InstanaSolarWinds Observability
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details*Log retention available in 1, 7, 15, 30, and 60 days (for more than 60 days retention, talk to sales).
More Pricing Information
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User Ratings
IBM InstanaSolarWinds Observability
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(47 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 InstanaSolarWinds Observability
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.
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SolarWinds
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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SolarWinds
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.
Read full review
SolarWinds
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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SolarWinds
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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SolarWinds
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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SolarWinds
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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SolarWinds
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
Read full review
SolarWinds
No answers on this topic
ScreenShots

SolarWinds Observability Screenshots

Screenshot of SolarWinds Observability Home PageScreenshot of SolarWinds Observability APM ServicesScreenshot of SolarWinds Observability KubernetesScreenshot of SolarWinds Observability InfrastructureScreenshot of SolarWinds Observability DEMScreenshot of SolarWinds Database Observability