IBM Instana vs. Kibana

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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)
Kibana
Score 7.3 out of 10
N/A
Kibana allows users to visualize Elasticsearch data and navigate the Elastic Stack so you can do anything from tracking query load to understanding the way requests flow through your apps.N/A
Pricing
IBM InstanaKibana
Editions & Modules
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)
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM InstanaKibana
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM InstanaKibana
Features
IBM InstanaKibana
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
IBM Instana
-
Ratings
Kibana
9.0
Ratings
7% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Customizable dashboards00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
IBM Instana
-
Ratings
Kibana
5.7
Ratings
33% below category average
Drill-down analysis00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Formatting capabilities00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration00 Ratings3.00 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
IBM Instana
-
Ratings
Kibana
8.8
Ratings
4% above category average
Publish to Web00 Ratings9.50 Ratings
Publish to PDF00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Report Versioning00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
IBM Instana
-
Ratings
Kibana
8.8
Ratings
8% above category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization00 Ratings9.50 Ratings
Predictive Analytics00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
IBM InstanaKibana
Small Businesses
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Score 8.8 out of 10
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic
Score 9.4 out of 10
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
NetBrain Technologies
NetBrain Technologies
Score 9.2 out of 10
Dataiku
Dataiku
Score 7.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IBM InstanaKibana
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
4.5
(0 ratings)
7.7
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM InstanaKibana
Likelihood to Recommend
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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Great for teams big and small that want a single pane of glass for understanding their systems, from dev, to staging, to production. Well-suited for teams that need to preserve logs for long-term compliance reasons, and also mine their logs for useful operational insights. Highly recommended as both an open source project and a commercial offering with fantastic paid support.
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Pros
  • 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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  • searching
  • near real-time
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Cons
  • 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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  • Improved tutorial/ user guidance
  • Improved labeling for sources
  • Ease of login and sharing with coworkers
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Likelihood to Renew
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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No answers on this topic
Usability
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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Its usability is generally good and it provides teams with a basic to intermediate understanding about data visualization. It is very user-friendly when it comes to creating dashboards. The UI is very good and simple. Its integration with other tools for alerting and reporting is amazing. But its advance features have a learning curve and a first timer needs some time to use the advance features.
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Support Rating
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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I have not contacted Kibana support.
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Alternatives Considered
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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Well when it comes to using Kibana when compared to Datadog, I can say that Kibana is pretty [...] cheap. Apart from APM and Datadog hosted agents, Kibana gives a good competition to Datadog for real time log analysis as well as metrics analysis. While OpsGenie is a great tool for alerting, it lacks visualization when compared to Kibana. Grafana is another opensource tool that gives a lot of insights like Kibana but Grafana cannot be easily integrated with OpenSearch.
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Return on Investment
  • 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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  • First stop when diagnosing production performance issues.
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ScreenShots