IBM Instana Observability The APM with precision that will help you succeed
October 08, 2025
IBM Instana Observability The APM with precision that will help you succeed
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with IBM Instana
We use IBM Instana to monitor real time critical payment transactions and leverage IBM Instana's 1 second granularity with a full cross-systems application Journey. it's propietary sensors support a lot of the current technology stacks being used no matter if on premise, or on the cloud and they are easy to configure and provide automated discovery insight which you can take advantage of the application perspective and create your own app story and what it should keep track up to have a precise representation of a solution or application. From there you can expand with events ( you can choose from thousands of built in ones or create your own custom events) and smart alerts which can integrate with several systems like slack or MS Teams for example . And have your team ( developers , operations ) be on notice on the moment something occurs. So you can tackle any issue with great detail provided by the sensors, find the root cause and have remediation ASAP. IBM Instana also has fantastic lightweight performance and it will not be competing with your host's resources. Overall , IBM Instana is a great APM that keeps improving and adding features will reduce downtime and incident resolution on your systems, because their goal is that your company and it's business succeeds.
Pros
- 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
Cons
- IBM Instana needs better role and user management capabilities for it's end users. They are addressing this though and it's on it's roadmap for 2026
- Sometimes it takes a little too many screens to drill down in the analytics perspective which leads to a lot of tabs being opened on the browser and you lose the previous view you had if you don't open in new tabs.
- You have to be careful with IBM Instana metadata headers, as it can affect legacy application's behaviors.
- Let's me monitor and pinpoint issues across multiple critical systems and applications that work in tandem, reducing drastically, the time in identifying root cause and solving the issues.
- Let's me deep dive into issues found with a lot of detailed information about particular requests , and find proper solutions by my own research or even with Gen AI assistant using Watson.x or you could prompt your AI solution of choice as well.
- All systems fail at some point, so IBM Instana gives stakeholders ease that large complex and critical systems that affect the very livelihood of people is being observed with pinpoint precision and that issues are addressed promptly and with compass pointing north towards the problem's root cause and solutions.
automated discovery and Out of Box experience of sensors for a large amount of known technology stacks. Getting up and running so long you have the proper firewall rules implemented, is matter of minutes and you'll be marveled as how it starts building up the monitoring and dependencies between systems and applications and the more you're observing the more of your application or systems journey you will be able to see.
Preemptively realize arising issues on critical systems. I've been recently beating our operations team in identifying problems in production environments to the point one minute they've told me I'm crazy , the next minute you were correct ! Now they love my custom events drive notifications to their MS Teams so they can be all hands on deck and we all can get working on recovering a system and mitigate issues as fast as possible.
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?
Yes
Did implementation of IBM Instana go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy IBM Instana again?
Yes
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