Instrumental Reviews

* Easy to implement.

* Elegantly designed dashboards that allow you to monitor the health of your system in one simple view.

* Instrument your application and display the new metric in minutes.

* Powerful querying language.

* Easily create alerts for system critical metrics.

* Great RESTful API.

* Clear documentation.

* Although you can quickly implement and display metrics. It takes a bit of dedication to harness its full power when it comes to more complex visualizations and alerts.

* The settings are simple, but could be a bit more polished.

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

Our application is instrumented with tens of thousands of custom metrics. Instrumental ingests and charts them all with ease! Our graphs are crucial to the daily operation of our service, and we've trusted them to Instrumental for years. Way more pleasant than Grafana.

Tons of custom metrics, with fast & easy graphing of same in up-to-the-minute dashboards.

Could use a couple features, though the support is amazing and they're actively working on many of our requests.

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

Easy to use and plug in new metrics - pretty nice grouping you can do on the app itself. Adding new metrics is just a line of code and a new graph. Also ease of grouping metrics by different time window is awesome feature. Time slicing ease is awesome to have. you could see the metrics way back in past without any hassle and wait time.

Never used pie charts but having an option to choose different type of graphs would be awesome to have. Not that I know if it's there or not but it was not there when I checked last time around a year back when I was researching the product.

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

Instrumental has the ability to very quickly give me an overview of the health of my product. I can look at a few graphs and instantly know that everything is ok. Set up is incredibly easy.

As you zoom out your timeframe in view, you lose some granularity.

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

Instrumental is a very low-drama tool. It's focused on gathering metrics, making graphs and dashboards, and doing some simple alerting, and it does those things well.

We use it to collect metrics at both the OS level and the application level. When all of that information is in the same system, it's far easier for us to correlate causes and effects in ways that would require multiple open tabs in other systems like New Relic.

I hate "Contact sales for pricing" links when I'm evaluating new additions to our tech stack, so I appreciate their simple, straightforward pricing model.

Their team is also pleasantly proactive and available. At one point they contacted us because our number of metrics had grown, and they wanted to make sure it was intentional. Other times, I've been able to have a quick chat with them about a desired feature or a library question, and it's easy to tell that you're talking with the person who wrote the actual code.

I can't think of any real negatives. They don't have libraries for every language, but they hit the major items I've needed. In the one case where I had to write some code myself that called their API, their documentation made it very low fuss.

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

It's hard to say. The customer support and hands-on approach to helping us get off the ground is hard to beat. At the same time, the price point for the software (_and_ having that support) blows competitors out of the water in our minds, too. I suppose the most succinct way to say it is that the value of the value-prop is the best we've seen for meeting our needs and have been thrilled in working with the Instrumental crew.

Not sure why G2 is requiring me to say something here so I'm stalling and eating up my min char count. (I dislike G2 requiring this field!)

Recommendations to others considering the product:

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

There are other services out there that do similar things, but Instrumental made gathering metrics and alerting on them so much easier than those.

Our favorite tools are being able to graph across application statistics and then have alerts when metrics are below thresholds.

Anyone starting to use this tool should spend time up front mapping out how they think the metrics will be used and referenced.

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

Flexibility. Instrumental lets us track just about anything we'd want to across our applications, front and back-end alike: system performance, deployment cycles, customer behavior, proprietary metrics, you name it.

The level of control over how all this data is visualized is outstanding.

There can be a bit of a learning curve with the query language. With so much flexibility it can take some consistent app usage to really get proficient in knowing how to create the reports desired. Solid documentation and a half-hour with the Instrumental team certainly help!

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

It is very easy to get everybody who needs access to it up and running at our company. We use Instrumental as a real time health dashboard of our physical locations as well as monitoring all aspects of our production system.

I love the flexibility that it offers over other similar tools. I never worry about it not being available and it has been a very solid product.

Instrumental is literally always up on a dashboard at our company, monitoring anything from customer reviews to API run times all on a single easy to read dashboard.

I'd really like the ability to clone graph groups, this would really help us set up new locations easier.

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

The flexibility! Instrumental gives you the ability to track pretty much anything your app can do: how often it happens, how long it takes, trends over time, with alerts when unexpected things happen. In addition to these custom metrics, the instrumental_agent library gives you a rock-solid foundation of commonly-used, actionable metrics right from the get-go.

While the core functionality of the Instrumental web app is extremely user-friendly, some ancillary tasks like user management (especially with lots of users) aren't as simple as I'd love to see eventually.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

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