Instana - The APM and Observability tool you need to try once !!
November 20, 2023
Instana - The APM and Observability tool you need to try once !!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with IBM Instana
Our team caters to different use cases in telecom sector including billing, marketing campaigns, value added services etc. This involves use of APIs, Microservices and Infrastructure from multiple vendors.
Each of these systems have their own format of logs and dependencies between systems is not very clear without having to go back to the documentations. Now we are using Instana as go to tool for identifying issues, improve observability and mapping flows between systems.
Some of the internal consumers have also started using Instana to have a clear picture of application and system state. The amount of information this tool collects (without much additional configuration) to provide insights is really helping both our team and the consumers.
Each of these systems have their own format of logs and dependencies between systems is not very clear without having to go back to the documentations. Now we are using Instana as go to tool for identifying issues, improve observability and mapping flows between systems.
Some of the internal consumers have also started using Instana to have a clear picture of application and system state. The amount of information this tool collects (without much additional configuration) to provide insights is really helping both our team and the consumers.
- 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
- 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.
- Automatic Identification of flows and interconnected components
- Custom application creation to capture important use cases
- Dynamic query perspectives in alarm setup
- Single pane of monitoring for multiple systems
- Issues are identified faster by built in and custom alerts with dynamic perspective, so ops can start to work on issues earlier
- Issues are also resolved faster as information from multiple systems is now present in one place which leads to faster identification of root cause and fix
- Using one tool instead of multiple monitoring tools helped us save costs
Splunk is also a wonderful tool for log analysis and operational troubleshooting however auto discovery and dependency flow creation makes Instana standout. We have to do a lot of preprocessing to ingest and format data in Splunk and then write complex queries for gathering the data we like, this has been solved beautifully in Instana and the user does not have to spend a lot of time in gathering or formatting data.
Do you think IBM Instana delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with IBM Instana's feature set?
Yes
Did IBM Instana live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of IBM Instana go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy IBM Instana again?
Yes