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IBM Instana

Score8.3 out of 10

174 Reviews and Ratings

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What is IBM Instana?

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.

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Categories & Use Cases

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IBM Instana Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features IBM Instana has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 174 ratings of IBM Instana's features
View all IBM Instana features

Top Performing Features

  • Remote monitoring

    Monitoring of network operational activities through the use of remote devices known as monitors or probes

    Category average: 9.2

  • Multiple Server Monitoring

    Server Monitoring is a process to monitor server's system resources like CPU Usage, Memory Consumption, I/O etc.

    Category average: 9.2

  • Multi-device monitoring

    Network device monitoring in real time for any devices on your network

    Category average: 8.8

Areas for Improvement

  • Data backup and recovery

    Backup and recovery of lost data

    Category average: 6.9

  • Service configuration management

    Service configuration management looks at all stages of the service lifecycle in order to provide information about an organization’s performance

    Category average: 6.7

  • Patch Management

    Patch management involves acquiring, testing, and installing multiple patches (code changes) to an administered computer system.

    Category average: 6.1

Who Buys & Uses IBM Instana

IBM Instana Reviews

What users are saying about IBM Instana.
View all IBM Instana reviews

Pros

  • Robust real-time monitoring and visibility for high-transaction applications
  • Effective root cause analysis and troubleshooting through data correlation
  • Comprehensive end-to-end performance and application observability

Cons

  • User Interface complexity and navigation challenges in larger deployments
  • Integration challenges with legacy applications and non-IBM products
  • Outdated documentation and complex installation procedures

SM- Instana Review

Incentivized
Sai Vinod Mannam
Sr DevOps Engineer in Finance and Accounting at FIS (10,001+ employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Instana is very easy to use and helpful for troubleshooting application scenarios. It makes API call troubleshooting, logs, traceability, and error tracing easy. We can also do deep troubleshooting to identify issues, which helps resolve problems in production-scale applications. A great product to use and easy to manage.

Pros

  • Easy to manage.
  • Easy to Deploy On Cloud.
  • Very useful to troubleshoot.

Cons

  • Requires lot of volume storage.
  • Requires additional compute.
  • But Great product to manage applications.

Return on Investment

  • It is good for application network troubleshooting scenarios.
  • API request monitoring.
  • Easy to Deploy and manage.

Alternatives Considered

IBM Vault, IBM Terraform and IBM Cognos Analytics

Other Software Used

IBM Vault, IBM Terraform, IBM Cognos Analytics

Instana - my observability.

Incentivized
Bobbie Geronimo
Technician in Information Technology at eBiZolution Inc. (11-50 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Proactive monitoring and remediation of incidents in mission-critical systems.

Pros

  • Fault detection
  • Alerting
  • Historical data

Cons

  • Able to build custom agents.
  • Log adapters.
  • Longer historical data retention.
  • Trend analysis.

Return on Investment

  • Time saving in isolating root cause.
  • Proactive monitoring.
  • Increased availability of mission critical systems.

Alternatives Considered

Dynatrace and Splunk AppDynamics

Other Software Used

IBM Storage Protect, IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition, IBM watsonx.ai

IBM Instana is an Effective Real Time Observability and Performance Monitoring Solution.

Olivia Morrat
DevOps Engineer in Information Technology at STRATEGY & SYNERGY (1-10 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

An effective IBM platform with great Automated discovery monitoring capability, and through this product, it's very simple to resolve application performance issues. Also, IBM Instana is very helpful for containerized Application troubleshooting, and its real-time observability tools are more productive. The system offers full context across the entire Application infrastructure.

Pros

  • Performance monitoring.
  • Root cause analytics creation.
  • Real time observability is perfect.

Cons

  • The Cloud deployment can be tricky for the new users.
  • Cloud performance can be improved.
  • Monitoring multiple application can be very technical.

Return on Investment

  • Effective real time Application performance monitoring.
  • Automatic discovery of application components.
  • Tracing production applications across various Cloud environment.
  • Trace end-to-end Application transaction.

Alternatives Considered

Sumo Logic, ManageEngine Site24x7 and Datalog

Other Software Used

Splunk AppDynamics, Dynatrace, Splunk Observability Cloud

IBM Instana review.

Incentivized
raghuvara Ittam
Principal Developer in Engineering at BCBSNC (5001-10,000 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Instana to monitor IBM API Power and IBM API Connect, and I wish these were integrated into API Connect.

Pros

  • Tracing.
  • Analysis
  • Helping in debugging.

Cons

  • Easy integration.
  • Less cost.

Return on Investment

  • It is expensive.
  • Better monitoring.
  • Alerts

Alternatives Considered

Datadog

Revision instana

Incentivized
Felipe Roldan
DevOps in Engineering at Banco del Austro (1001-5000 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Instana for server observability, AWS and AWS EKS loads, as well as alert sitemaps which have helped us to better determine errors found.

Usamos instana para observabilidad de nuestros servidores, cargas en aws y aws eks, asi como tambien sitemap de alertas que nos a ayudado a determinar de mejor manera errors encontrados

Pros

  • Integration with OpenTelemetry
  • Integration with EKS.
  • Integration with AWS.

Cons

  • Integration with OpenShift has resource issues.
  • Integration con open shift tiene problemas de recursos

Return on Investment

  • It improved knowledge of resources and detection of failing services.
  • Mejoro el conocimiento de los recursos y detection de servicios que fallan

IBM Instana Alternatives

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