Checkmk vs. IBM Instana

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Checkmk
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
Checkmk is a solution for IT Monitoring of servers, applications, networks, cloud infrastructures (public, private, hybrid), containers, storage, databases and environment sensors. It can be deployed under all major Linux distributions or users can run it as Docker container or virtual appliance on other operating systems including Windows. The tool is available as a Raw Edition, which is open-source, and as an Enterprise Edition with a many additional enterprise features. The…
$0
up to 10 systems
IBM Instana
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
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.
$18
per month per Managed Virtual Server (MVS)
Pricing
CheckmkIBM Instana
Editions & Modules
Checkmk Free Edition
$0.00
up to 10 systems
Checkmk Raw Edition
$0.00
unlimited & always free
Checkmk Enterprise Edition
starting at $600.00
Essentials
$18
per month per Managed Virtual Server (MVS)
Standard
$75
per month per Managed Virtual Server (MVS)
Self-Hosted
$93.80
per month per Managed Virtual Server (MVS)
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CheckmkIBM Instana
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup Fee$600 for up to 3,000 Services / around 100 hostsNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
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User Ratings
CheckmkIBM Instana
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(0 ratings)
8.6
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(0 ratings)
8.3
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
4.5
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
CheckmkIBM Instana
Likelihood to Recommend
In our organization which is a mash up of different hardware, software it was important to use an independent tool that wasn’t linked to one manufacturer incase a piece of hardware was dropped from support for example, we also value open-source software highly in our field. It’s important to in our IT environment to be able to customize and tweak software that we run. We don’t use the cloud monitoring aspect so Cannot comment on that side of the software.
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With enterprise IT assets in a multitude of ecosystems, cloud infrastructures and sometimes still left stuck in a legacy on prem architecture, IBM Instana makes it easy to get the right data to drive development and / or DevSecOps processes with tangible input from the target environment itself.
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Pros
  • monitoring
  • alerts
  • Graphs
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  • 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
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Cons
  • Layout
  • Ease of Use
  • Upgradability
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  • I believe that the "live" option in monitoring does not truly update the status in real-time, thus I must manually update to feel comfortable.
  • The call analysis tool might be improved, third-party resources are restricted, and the pricing is slightly more than competitors in comparable categories.
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Likelihood to Renew
Very helpful software and I highly recommend to have on hand as a tool for testing, troubleshooting, and monitoring.
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Instana has been able to fulfill our all requirement and provide out of box solution for multiple component like AWS RDS Monitoring and real time alerting setup on basis of that. it is also easy to integrate with other open-source alerting and monitoring tools which makes it easier to incorporate into our solutions
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Usability
Overall Checkmk is a great product that is made and ran by a European company that is open source and highly customizable, great support if needed. On prem support is a must for our organization which Checkmk supports. Our organization has been using Checkmk for over 5 years now Performance of the software runs excellent on its own Linux server, for any company with a good Linux admin, you can have a lot of un tweaking and creating custom checks for every aspect of your environment.
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IBM Instana totally alters our monitoring approach since it increases the stability of the system and simplifies the process of problem solving. And since it helps to lower the degree of alert exhaustion that we experience, it is a total game changer for us.
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Support Rating
No answers on this topic
IBM instana support team is good but when we ask them for support, they keep asking same thing again and again and mostly there is no solution
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Alternatives Considered
We moved over to Checkmk from Nagios which felt like a natural evolution at the time as the raw version is based on Nagios, I vaguely not having any major issues moving over at the time. We still use the Raw version but we are planning to move to the enterprise version in the next 6 – 12 months as our needs expand.
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As a DevOps engineer, I've explored various Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools, including New Relic for real-time insights, AppDynamics for code-level visibility, Dynatrace for AI-driven monitoring, Datadog for comprehensive observability, Splunk for log management, Stackify Retrace for error tracking, and Raygun for crash reporting. Each tool offers distinct features, and the choice depends on specific use cases, technology stacks, and organizational needs. Thorough evaluations, considering factors like ease of use, integration capabilities, and scalability, help in selecting the most suitable APM solution for effective application monitoring in a DevOps environment.
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Return on Investment
  • avoid downtime
  • Plan updates based on usage of a VM or network switch to avoid impacting users
  • User satisfaction increased due to less visible downtime or issues with our IT infrastructure.
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  • 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.
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ScreenShots