IBM Instana vs. Virtana Platform

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.

Incentivized

Overall I would say that we have been very happy with Zenoss. It has been a great server monitoring tool. There are certain aspects that we would like to expand into, such as Capacity Planning, Network Performance Monitoring, and log analysis. We have coupled Zenoss logs with Splunk for external log management, but would like to start using some of the built-in analysis tools.

• 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

• Monitoring Windows, Unix/Linux, Infra apps, storage, virtualization, converge infra etc..
• Integrate with other monitoring tools and receive events for aggregation and correlation
• Integration with ITSM( SNOW) for auto ticket creation

Incentivized

• 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

• It can be tricky to set-up depending on what you want to do.
• They have their own proprietary way of visualizing metrics, which is clever but does have a slight learning curve.

Incentivized

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

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

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

Anytime we've had issues they have been very responsive and professional.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We strongly prefer Metricly for AWS Cost Analysis -- whereas other tools are easier to use on a traditional monitoring basis. To be clear, Merticly's monitoring tools are GREAT, but they require tuning and manual setup that we didn't have the time for on a small Platform Operations team. We have worked closely with Metricly to expand on their cost analysis capabilities, and plan to use them going forward.

Incentivized

• 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

• We're a reseller/Integrator, so this question has a somewhat different meaning to our business. For us, Zenoss Cloud allows us to provide a single Cloud-based monitoring platform that can address virtually all our clients' use cases, dramatically simplifying our training and staffing requirements. Instead of training Engineers on several platforms, including the installation of physical hardware/software, we can focus on a single platform.
• The faster time-to-deployment and always-on cloud platform is a great fit for DevOps environments and newer software-defined data center platforms. The ability of Zenoss to support these environments solves what has been a major blind spot, slowing adoption of platforms that have been difficult to effectively manage with legacy monitoring platforms.
• For clients, the ability to consolidate from multiple prem-based tools to a single cloud-based platform is huge. Eliminating multiple licenses and ongoing hardware & administration costs can show a 1-2 year ROI.