IBM Instana vs. SolarWinds Observability

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Instana
Score 8.9 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 host
SolarWinds Observability
Score 0.0 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
SaaS
$75
per month per host
Self-Hosted
$93.80
per month per host
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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IBM Instana
IBM Instana
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IBM InstanaSolarWinds Observability
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(27 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM InstanaSolarWinds Observability
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM
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.
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SolarWinds
No answers on this topic
Pros
IBM
  • 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
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SolarWinds
No answers on this topic
Cons
IBM
  • 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.
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SolarWinds
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
IBM
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.
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SolarWinds
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
IBM
  • 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
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