Instana Reviews

User Rating

4.6/5 (Based on 94 Ratings)

Rating Distribution

Excellent
64.9%
Very Good
33%
Average
1.1%
Poor
1.1%
Terrible
0%

User Sentiments

Ease of Use, Microservice Monitoring, Detailed Performance Insights, Extensive Integrations

Steep Learning Curve, Limited .NET Support, Occasional Support Delays, Instability After Updates

Do You Use Instana?

Write a Review

Review Summary

Instana's customer reviews reveal both strengths and weaknesses. Praises are directed towards its user-friendly interface, comprehensive features, and helpful customer support. The platform is lauded for its efficient installation and configuration processes, enabling quick integration into existing systems. However, some users have encountered challenges with the product's complexity, reporting occasional bugs and performance issues that require attention. Additionally, the pricing structure has been a concern for some, citing it as a potential barrier for wider adoption.

Pros

Detailed monitoring: Provides realtime performance monitoring and visualizations for applications and infrastructure.
AIpowered analytics: Utilizes AI and machine learning for advanced insights, anomaly detection, and predictive analysis.

Cons

Steep learning curve: The platform's comprehensive features may require significant time and effort to fully understand and utilize.
Potential performance impact: Implementing the platform may introduce additional overhead and resource usage, potentially impacting system performance.

AI-Generated from the text of User Reviews

Did you find this information valuable?

YES NO

Reviews

Ishan S

August 7, 2023 Source: G2.com

"Great Application Performance Monitoring Tool"

What do you like best about IBM Instana?

IBM instana is great product which provides very efficient cloud environemnt monitoring as well as telemetry data associated with it. It aslo provides migration facilities so one can freely move to different cloud providers.

What do you dislike about IBM Instana?

There is nothing to dislike, it has very user friendly interface and one can learn and manage it very less time with its great documentation.

What problems is IBM Instana solving and how is that benefiting you?

It helps us in monitoring the IT incidents and service requests very effectienly and also helps us in alerting customers in the scenarios of downtime or utilizations etc. It also gives insights of customer's cloud infrastructure.

Ashish K

February 24, 2023 Source: G2.com

"An overall great tool for the engineering team"

What do you like best about IBM Instana?

Where do I even start. There's so much to explore and make use of. I've only probably used like 30% of what this tool has to offer. And I do this very easily with it:

1. See critical incidents, set up alerts, analyze all other services' states in the range of time in which an incident occurred

2. Amazing log analysis, infra ingress and egress monitoring, filtering, aggregation, code flows, super detailed drill down of API calls down to the last DB call and finding bottlenecks

3. amazing filtering options. I only use like 3-4 but even with them it's so easy to pinpoint to a time and app state that I want to see.

4. love the short url shortcut so much - it's a very small thing, but very useful when needing to share 10s of such links per debugging session. more apps should generate short links because nobody likes to see the whole query in a link.

5. if you're new to a company, it's a great tool for practically understanding the infra setup and monitor the innards using the amazing dashboard with its range selection that can be highligted across all services' charts in real time, to help you pinpoint problems even more easily.

What do you dislike about IBM Instana?

If I google instana, there's no link I can open from the website that I can login to my company's account from. this makes it hard to login - i have to keep my company's login url handy.

I wish there were a way to check POST bod- that would making debugging easier

I think that's about it. Not much to dislike.

What problems is IBM Instana solving and how is that benefiting you?

monitoring CIs by setting up alerts and using dashboards

analyzing logs for debugging issues and infra issues

monitoring infra health using dashboards

monitoring specific parts of the app for a temporary time

learning infra layout

shefali n

February 19, 2023 Source: G2.com

"Precise Tool which makes working in a customer project support team heaven"

What do you like best about IBM Instana?

The monitoring system is the most equipped one!

It has features which are very easy for a layman also to understand.

The product is self-sufficient!!

Monitoring our systems on any thresholds if are hit.. we get various dashboards reflecting each of it.

What do you dislike about IBM Instana?

Absolutely nothing ! The product is self sucfficient !!

It has features which is very easy for a layman also to understand.

The monitoring system is the most equipped one!

Recommendations to others considering IBM Instana:

We are monitoring our systems on any thresholds if they are hit. We get various dashboards reflecting each of them.

It has features that are very easy for a layman also to understand.

The product is self-sufficient!!

The monitoring system is the most equipped one!

It's a perfect Tool. One should go for it, in case there's a need for such tools in the project! Also, this can add up to the productivity of the team.

One can have multiple graphs and reports built on different objects to see the real-time stats of any entity.

For example:-

If one has to check how many orders are getting placed daily!

Those can be tracked easily, and it gives a clear perspective on the actual status.

So it's a life savior in many terms !!

Go for Instana any DAY

What problems is IBM Instana solving and how is that benefiting you?

Monitoring our systems on any thresholds if are hit.. we get variuos dashboards reflecting ech of it.

It has features which is very easy for a layman also to understand.

Shiddarth S

February 17, 2023 Source: G2.com

"Saves me and my organization every day with its brilliant data and visualization"

What do you like best about IBM Instana?

I want to compare Instana to a Department store where everything is available, and you don't need separate stores for each, which is by default time-consuming and tedious job. In short, the complete Application/user monitoring and debugging is well presented in its interface.

What do you dislike about IBM Instana?

After a few weeks, the data is deleted/approximated as a data retention policy, which sometimes, on analyzing the old issues, we couldn't come to a judgment. Please consider if you can increase the timeline a little bit more.

What problems is IBM Instana solving and how is that benefiting you?

Before Instana, we used to have a 24*7 team that looked at the logs continuously, and on any error, they will call our developers/tech support people. Now the team isn't really required since we have the alerting mechanism configured for all errors. Also, the logs from server to user and back to the server in each transaction can easily be tracked and understood; if Instana isn't there, I feel that I need to work at least 5 or 6 times than the time I'm doing now.

Fagner L

December 3, 2020 Source: G2.com

"Melhor APM do mercado. Implantação transparente e entrega valor muito rápidamente."

What do you like best?

Trabalho atualmente conectado o dia todo no Instana e também usei nos meus 3 ultimos trabalhos.

A implantação é muito simples e o tempo para começar a entregar valor é muito rápido.

As demais ferramentas do mercado são muito complexas comparadas ao Instana.

Nosso processo de treinamento e rollout do conhecimento é muito rápido pois a ferramenta é bem intuitiva.

What do you dislike?

Só tive problemas no passado com implantação em .net muito antigo, mas com PHP e linguagens atualizadas é tudo bem simples.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Utilizei a maioria das ferramentas do mercado.

Gosto muito do Instana, pois é focada em APM e tem um processo de implantação muito simples.

A entrega de valor é momentanea.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

O Instana resolve diversos problemas no meu dia a dia.

Utilizo muito para dar visibilidade para os desenvolvedores e corrigir problemas antes do cliente final alarmar.

O Instana exibe as informações de uma forma muito simples e acessivel para qualquer nivel de desenvolvedor.

Tenho um trace completo das request, sem precisar fazer nenhuma manipulação na aplicação.

O processo de IA e identicação de desvios é muito legal e automático.

Fabio C

November 30, 2020 Source: G2.com

"Instana melhor APM para times de DEVOPS e SRE"

What do you like best?

O Instana proporciona uma excelente visão de infraestrutura e visão de aplicação para os times de SRE,DEVOPS e DEV.

A ferramenta é de fácil utilização e compreensão para analise de troubleshooting.

What do you dislike?

Um dos pontos que mais me encantou é possível fazer o tracer desde do browser do usuário até todas as camadas de aplicações.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Poder monitorar vários cluster de Kubernerts em uma única tela, proporcionando uma visão de operação fantástica.

Administrator in Insurance

June 26, 2020 Source: G2.com

"Very good solution for performance monitoring"

What do you like best?

- On-prem use, very good support during implementation (workshops)

- Simple, intuitive installation (Linux skills required)

- Feature requests very often find their way into the finished product

- Support always reacts quickly and delivers competent solutions

- Extensive monitoring of a wide variety of technologies without great administrative effort

- Provides a detailed overview of the system landscape

- Alerting possible via various channels (email, Slack, Opsgenie, ...)

What do you dislike?

- On-prem version always slightly behind the cloud version

- Operation not always intuitive, training required

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

- Discover performance problems

- Alerting before major problems occur (example "You will run out of disk space in about 58 minutes")

Maurício C

June 23, 2020 Source: G2.com

"An end to end tool"

What do you like best?

It's a really awesome tool, It's easy to get it running into your infrastructure and their automatic correlation between the different "layers" (application to infrastructure) is really great.

What do you dislike?

I have been using it for a few months and so far I'm really happy with it.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I have been using it to handle several different "solutions" running into the same infrastructure, and the Instana team have been really supportive to understand the different scenarios and to suggest the right approach in each one of them.

Administrator in Insurance

June 23, 2020 Source: G2.com

"Out of the box application monitoring with Instana"

What do you like best?

Automatic discovery and monitoring including tracing of all applications

What do you dislike?

The OnPrem update process was previously complex and prone to errors

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Detailed performance monitoring of applications

aaron w

June 9, 2020 Source: G2.com

"a flashlight in the dark"

What do you like best?

distributed tracing shows the volume and type of traffic between application components as well as how long each call within a trace takes.

follow-your-nose breadcrumb paradigm: everything is clickable, link-able, and related

monitoring and alerting capabilities

intuitive design and easy to understand ui

instrumentation of almost any technology

super easy installation for any type of environment, whether k8s, bare-metal, or containerized

low-configuration

What do you dislike?

nothing too mentionable really. the only thing that could be better right now is creating alerts based off of information in the ui and perhaps better or more flexible visualization in-product.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

their product is not up to par with the legacy players in the field, like appdynamics, new relic, and dynatrace - instana blows em out of the water! their product is easier to install, maintain, and use. it's significantly more cost-effective, especially for containerized environments. the ability to correlate disparate components' performance and load with other components is invaluable and has saved thousands of man hours over the years within my company. i truly cannot overstate the value of this product. on top of that, this is the only vendor in my decade and a half of being in this career, that feels like working with co-workers. they are proactive in our success, they are communicative, responsible, and accountable, and they are invested in our use-cases and needs. this is not just a good company with a great product, this is a group of people with integrity, humour, knowledge, and domain expertise.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

initially, we got instana for root cause analyses of production incidents. we use instana for end user monitoring, rcas/iras, performance testing, monitoring of services, infrastructure, etc., alerting, and so much more. our application is java/scala, and has very large heaps (>200g), so we used instana heavily during the tuning of heaps and garbage collection.

we also ue the tracing quite a bit to understand what code is being invoked, how many times, and in what context. this insight led us to identifying hundreds of instances of unintentional queries, requests for unused information, and unexpected code paths. within the first three months of using instana, we created hundreds of jiras for developers to enhance and refactor code.

Instana Reviews

User Rating

Rating Distribution

User Sentiments

Do You Use Instana?

Review Summary

Pros

Cons

Ishan S

Ashish K

shefali n

Shiddarth S

Fagner L

What do you like best?

What do you dislike?

Recommendations to others considering the product:

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Fabio C

What do you like best?

What do you dislike?

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Administrator in Insurance

What do you like best?

What do you dislike?

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Maurício C

What do you like best?

What do you dislike?

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Administrator in Insurance

What do you like best?

What do you dislike?

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

aaron w

What do you like best?

What do you dislike?

Recommendations to others considering the product:

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We understand SaaS better

SaaSworthy helps stakeholders choose the right SaaS platform based on detailed product information, unbiased reviews, SW score and recommendations from the active community.

Buyers

Makers