IBM Instana vs. Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)

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)
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is a monitoring and application performance management option, with the core datacenter and cloud-based systems monitoring.N/A
Pricing
IBM InstanaMicrosoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
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 InstanaMicrosoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
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 InstanaMicrosoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
Features
IBM InstanaMicrosoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
Application Performance Management
Comparison of Application Performance Management features of Product A and Product B
IBM Instana
-
Ratings
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
6.1
Ratings
22% below category average
Application monitoring00 Ratings5.00 Ratings
Database monitoring00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Threshold alerts00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Predictive capabilities00 Ratings2.00 Ratings
Application performance management console00 Ratings3.00 Ratings
Collaboration tools00 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications00 Ratings4.00 Ratings
Application dependency mapping and thresholding00 Ratings4.00 Ratings
Virtualization monitoring00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Server availability and performance monitoring00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
IT Asset Discovery00 Ratings5.00 Ratings
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IBM InstanaMicrosoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
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User Ratings
IBM InstanaMicrosoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
4.5
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM InstanaMicrosoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
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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Well suited for IT Departments that can budget the funds and time needed for setup and maintenance of SCOM. The end product is well suited for medium to large environments that have 100's of resources that require monitoring and reporting. Enterprise level statistics are at your fingertips with a few clicks of a mouse after the product has been configured and agents have been deployed. As I said previously, we are a small business and I was fortunate enough to be able to budget this product into our environment. It did take us a while to configure and fully deploy, but as a result, we are well-informed and are able to extract detailed information as it pertains to usage/consumption of our workstation and server resources to include performance metrics and any errors that may arise.
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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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  • SCOM can manage Windows OS systems from desktops to servers very well.
  • SCOM is platform agnostic in that we manage physical and virtual machines with no differentiation.
  • SCOM can quickly deploy emergency security patches and the best part is it can provide detailed results of success and failure rate of patch deployment.
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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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  • It is a monster of a system and really needs a person managing the system full time
  • Options are a bit clunky especially when you need to set overrides.
  • Takes a lot of time and effort to setup alerts as you want them, don't rely on the out of the box options you need to invest time into the system to get what you want out of it.
  • Make sure you size the underlying database server/s correctly (Microsoft provide a tool to calculate based on number of objects you plan to collect data on), it is a datawarehouse underneath after all.
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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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Microsoft System Center Operations Manager is tightly integrated to Microsoft Windows servers os monitoring with great product support.
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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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Ease of Use and user friendly dashboard
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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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Hard to get support. The product is not being actively developed anymore, so it is hard to get new features for the product.
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
Easy to install with intuitive interactive interface during the installation process a and integration to MS SQL was smooth
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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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SolarWinds stacks well on the ease of use with an easily installable version and highly modular (products can be added to the basic installation and are easily managed from a single endpoint. System Center Operations Manager was selected because the majority of the environment is based on Windows products and it was part of the licensing agreement. It offered an easy way to consolidate the monitoring tools to provide a single point of management.
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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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  • Since we are at the tail end of our POC, we have no immediate ROI to report.
  • That said, during the POC, we immediately identified several issues within TFS that we immediately addressed and will potentially save us hours of lost time and troubleshooting.
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ScreenShots