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 Pingdom

    Score8 out of 10
    N/ASolarWinds Pingdom is a website uptime monitoring and alert tool, with additional reporting and Real User Monitoring capabilities. Pingdom is part of SolarWinds’s DevOps package, enabling full-stack monitoring as a service.

    $14.95

    per month

    Pricing
    IBM InstanaSolarWinds Pingdom
    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)
    Synthetic Monitoring
    $10
    per month
    Real User Monitoring
    $10
    per month
    Enterprise
    Custom Pricing
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    IBM InstanaSolarWinds Pingdom
    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 Pingdom
    Considered Both Products
    IBM
    No answer on this topic
    SolarWinds
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    61 Answers
    98%
    Would buy again
    52 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    53 Answers
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    52 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    61 Answers
    98%
    Happy with the feature set
    52 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    93%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    40 Answers
    96%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    43 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    96%
    Implementation went as expected
    47 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    49 Answers
    Features
    IBM InstanaSolarWinds Pingdom
    Monitoring Tasks
    Comparison of Monitoring Tasks features of IBM Instana and SolarWinds Pingdom
    Feature
    IBM Instana
    7.6
    3 Ratings
    9% below category average
    SolarWinds Pingdom
    -
    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 Pingdom
    Feature
    IBM Instana
    5.5
    1 Ratings
    23% below category average
    SolarWinds Pingdom
    -
    Ratings
    Software and hardware inventory6.42 Ratings00 Ratings
    Policy-based automation4.52 Ratings00 Ratings
    Reporting
    Comparison of Reporting features of IBM Instana and SolarWinds Pingdom
    Feature
    IBM Instana
    6.5
    3 Ratings
    20% below category average
    SolarWinds Pingdom
    -
    Ratings
    Performance data reports8.34 Ratings00 Ratings
    Customizable reporting4.52 Ratings00 Ratings
    Data visualization8.83 Ratings00 Ratings
    Risk analysis4.52 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    IBM InstanaSolarWinds Pingdom
    Small Businesses
    Amazon CloudWatch
    Score7.6 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    LogicMonitor
    Score8.9 out of 10
    SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor (WPM)
    Score8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    ManageEngine Site24x7
    Score10 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    IBM InstanaSolarWinds Pingdom
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.8
    (60 ratings)
    4.5
    (64 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    10.0
    (4 ratings)
    Usability
    8.3
    (3 ratings)
    10.0
    (7 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    4.5
    (1 ratings)
    4.1
    (54 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    IBM InstanaSolarWinds Pingdom
    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
    I believe the scenarios we used it for were quite well covered, from the executive perspective. The downtime alarms worked very well and were easy to setup, uptime monitoring tools were clear and easy to use, even for non-technical people (C-level) and the SLA management tools allowed us to spend less time, and have less friction, with our clients
    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
    • The alerts are very responsive offering quite detailed timing information
    • The UI for reports is very clear and set up of reports is very intuitive
    • Customer service was good when there were problems - e.g. lapsing billing causing reporting to go down
    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 PagerDuty integration could be a lot better. When you use the PagerDuty integration, it doesn't send any information about which check failed! It just sends a message like "Timeout (> 30s)" -- this isn't very helpful when we have hundreds of checks. We've worked around this by using both the PagerDuty and Slack integrations and having them both post to the same Slack channel. But this means that when an engineer is paged from PagerDuty, they have to go to Slack (or Pingdom) to find the details about the page; it's not available on the page itself.
    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
    Recently added features have made Pingdom less intuitive for our requirements. While Pingdom has a broad offering and remains a good value, it is becoming more than we need. Our customer base is becoming more and more global and Pingdom still lacks Asia-Pacific monitoring, which we will need within a year.
    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
    Pingdom is easy to use, very intuitive and has a very short learning curve. From the onset, we've been able to jump in and leverage the tool to accomplish our goals for page speed performance and discover the insights we need to make improvements. Its a well-designed tool and makes for a good user experience.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    Interface is unnecessarily complicated and frequently responds slowly.
    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
    Support responded the same day to my query, as I was setting the product up but couldn't find the setting I needed. This was successfully resolved in a short time frame, so I was pleased with how quickly we were able to get this resolved. I haven't needed to contact support since.
    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
    1. PRTG Network Monitor was a far more complicated tool to use and set up albeit it does both Internal and External monitoring. The setup wasn't intuitive and there are too many configuration options to complete to form an alert
    2. Amazon CloudWatch is specific to AWS resources and cannot be easily use outside of the AWS Ecosystem
    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
    • Honestly, we have 4 other products that overlap this functionality whose organizations provide far superior support. At this point it is an unnecessary expense.
    • In my opinion, their lack of support responsiveness and commitment has impacted our IT agility.
    • Its time to explore other alternatives.
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    SolarWinds Pingdom Screenshots

    Product screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshot