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IBM Instana

Score8.1 out of 10

126 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.

Categories & Use Cases

Most Frequent Users

Top 3 industries using IBM Instana.
Based on HG Insights installation data
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#1 most frequent

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

14.5%

154 installations of 1,059

“visibility of relationships between services in a situation where I was unfamiliar with a subset of services (could quickly understand what was calling what.”

— Automation practice lead, DAI Source (11-50 employees)
Verified Review
#2 most frequent

Finance and Insurance

13.7%

145 installations of 1,059

“Preemptively realize arising issues on critical systems.”

— Full Stack Senior Dev. Specialist, EVERTEC LLC (1001-5000 employees)
Verified Review
#3 most frequent

Information

8.4%

89 installations of 1,059

IBM Instana Reviews

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

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 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

George brian
Director of Financial Operations in Finance and Accounting at Teshama Group (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I like how easy it is to connect IBM Instana with our infrastructure. I also like the fact that they have a free trial, which was perfect for us. We used the 14-day free trial to decide of IBM Instana is the right fit for us, and then we switched to the pay-per-use plan, which we've been using for a about 4 months. Now it has been a great tool for monitoring, improving app uptime and reliability.

Pros

  • Great tool for monitoring, improving app uptime and reliability.
  • The 14-day free trial.
  • Easy tracing and quicker issue identification, which really helped during testing.

Cons

  • The UI can be a bit confusing sometimes, especially when searching for specific details.

Return on Investment

  • Gives us real-time, automated observability across apps with zero configuration.
  • Fast troubleshooting for production issues.
  • Fast root cause analysis.

Alternatives Considered

Datadog, Dynatrace and Grafana

Observability at Scale with IBM Instana

Incentivized
Sabina Kibari
IT Operations Manager in Information Technology at Feeding Futures (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

This tool has been helpful in monitoring the health status of our application and cloud environments. It allows for quicker detection of incidents. It has enabled us to get a deeper understanding why applications slow down.

Pros

  • Discovery of our infrastructure automatically.
  • Integrates well with our CI/CD pipelines
  • It automatically creates performance baselines for each service
  • I like how it allows us to create custom dashboards

Cons

  • The customization options are quite restrictive.
  • Advanced filtering and configuration takes time to learn

Return on Investment

  • Reduced downtime and improved uptime.
  • Faster onboarding for new services.
  • Faster incident resolution.

Alternatives Considered

New Relic and Dynatrace

Other Software Used

Atlassian Jira, PagerDuty, Microsoft Power BI, Asana

IBM Instana very powerful and effective monitoring platform

Gilberto Douglas
Site Reliability Engineer in Engineering at District Hospital (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Instana to monitor our healthcare platforms, which includes patients - facing apps, diagnostic systems and backend APIs . As our architecture is based on microservices,we needed end-to-end visibility and fast incident response to ensure uninterrupted access to healthcare services. This aligns with real deployments where Instana provides "real time visibility" and supports rapid response in complex systems.

Pros

  • Real-time observability
  • Monitoring centralization.
  • Incident response time improved

Cons

  • Custom dashboard needs effort
  • Steep learning curve for new users.

Return on Investment

  • Improved time Management significantly
  • It's centralized monitoring made work easier
  • Tracing capability allows us to locate failures across distributed services.

IBM Instana Adoption at AOI

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Instana as our primary APM solution. We deploy the agent to our custom built microservice applications (Java, .NET, JavaScript) in containers as well as vendor applications on Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We use it for troubleshooting and application tracing as well as general system health monitoring and alerting.

Pros

  • The interface is nice looking and very responsive.
  • The detail and granularity of the data and visualization is impressive.
  • It does a good job of bringing genuine issues ("events") to the forefront without many false-positives.
  • Agent installation is pretty straight-forward.

Cons

  • The agent can generate a lot of temp files when debugging and can quickly cause disk space problems.
  • The web interface frequently has brief errors or fails to load but it usually works a minute or two later.
  • Scoping and perspectives are difficult to configure
  • Agent configuration pretty complicated and documentation of the configurations is sparse or incomplete.
  • Alerting is limited and you can't do complex alerts with a combination of metrics

Return on Investment

  • Simplified deployment of APM solution
  • Single APM platform for all our technologies
  • Decreased time for application on-boarding

Alternatives Considered

Dynatrace, Splunk AppDynamics, Splunk Enterprise and Datadog

Other Software Used

Splunk Enterprise, Slack, Red Hat OpenShift, Duck Creek Suite

IBM Instana Alternatives

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