IBM Instana vs. StackState

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.

Incentivized

StackState is suitable for 1000+ hosts. Sometimes specific applications can take higher development time. Well suited for hybrid platforms to build end to end service alarms and service views. Advanced UI navigation might require some training. It is not a simple download and deploy software. It will require development in an agile model. Where newer versions are deployed to suit exact client requirements. Support contract with the StackState Engineer for development of use-cases is required and very useful.

• 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

Incentivized

• Giving observability of the entire IT stack
• Custom alerting options.
• Ingesting many different types of data.
• Requesting new features is encouraged and they often add them quite quickly.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Can't think of anything yet.

Some elements of the product haven't had the usability upgrade yet and can be a bit technical. This is to be expected as they are trying to solve complex problems. I am sure that in the future, steps will be made to simplify this as well for the users / administrators / developers of the platform.

It's swift, they're thinking along with us. It's a "collaboration approach" rather than a (traditional) customer-supplier relation. Out new ideas are taken in concern and often ends up in enhancements of StackState

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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Increased visibility of all resources in cloud to 100%.
• Deviated stages are able to detect problems before their occurrence. However, [it] needs tunings for false alarms.