IBM Instana vs. Sentry

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
Sentry
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Sentry provides engineering teams with tools to detect and solve user-impacting bugs and other issues.
$26
per month
Pricing
IBM InstanaSentry
Editions & Modules
SaaS
$75
per month per host
Self-Hosted
$93.80
per month per host
Team
$26
per month
Business
$80
per month
Developer
Free
Enterprise
Contact sales team
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM InstanaSentry
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM InstanaSentry
Considered Both Products
IBM Instana
Chose IBM Instana
Instana is better at call tracing than the previous ones and is cost effective as well. But AppD can do a better job at constructing customised metrics, alert profiles and alert conditions as well, but it misses a lot of important details while tracing a call. At the same time, …
Sentry
Chose Sentry
Both AppD and Instana are a superset of sentry the majority of the time. Sentry is specialised in error tracking does the best in it, but the other too mentioned does a similar job along with multiple other monitoring features. Also, sampling of data is best in Instana, and is …
Top Pros

No answers on this topic

Top Cons

No answers on this topic

Best Alternatives
IBM InstanaSentry
Small Businesses
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Score 8.5 out of 10
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.9 out of 10
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprises
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.9 out of 10
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IBM InstanaSentry
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(27 ratings)
8.3
(12 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM InstanaSentry
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.
Read full review
Sentry
Great for standard web application performance monitoring, analytics and error reporting. Shows line level code errors, gives insight into performance issues (plugins, API issues, etc.). Automation and scheduled scanning in production gives client visibility into 'after deployment' value. Also lets a relatively small number of developers keep tabs on a handful of different site/applications without needing a bunch of tools. The UI is pretty complicated and can be overwhelming for new users. Documentation could be better for the learning curve,
Read full review
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
Read full review
Sentry
  • Great web interface. Lots of data available in a really clean format, with filtering options and more.
  • Per-user exception tracking. User is complaining about something being broken? Look up their account ID in Sentry and you can see if they've run into any exceptions (with device information included, of course).
  • Source map uploading. Took a little while to figure this out but now we have our deploy script upload sourcemaps to Sentry on each deployment, meaning we get to see stack traces that aren't obfuscated!
  • Very generous free tier – 10,000 events per month. We're nowhere near that yet.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Sentry
  • Alert Configuration. Would be really helpful to have multiple logical groupings within the "If" section of a single configurable alert.
  • Alert Copying. Being able to copy an alert from one project to another would be super beneficial.
  • Alert Tags. Better UI around how we select which tags are getting sent with each alert instead of a tiny text box.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Sentry
We used Rollbar but didn't like the configuration its not easy. And also doesn't support wide features like Sentry although its a cheaper option but doesn't have the dash-boarding like Sentry and its was not easy to integrate webhooks for different purposes. Somehow many people in company where not able to understand Rollbar dashboard who were very much used to Sentry.
Read full review
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
Sentry
  • It helped stabilize our system in the beginning
  • We had to take it down later due to internal reasons and majorly because of cost-cutting process
  • If someone has a unstable system and have no way to figure out what to do, can use sentry at least temporarily along with some other APM to fix their system faster
Read full review
ScreenShots