IBM Instana vs. SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability

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)
SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds® Hybrid Cloud Observability aims to provide a comprehensive, integrated, and full-stack solution designed to optimize performance, improve availability, and reduce remediation time by correlating data from across the IT ecosystem, including networks, servers, applications, databases, and more.
$5
per month per node
Pricing
IBM InstanaSolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability
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)
Essentials
$5
per month per node
Advanced
$9
per month per node
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM InstanaSolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsPricing is set per node, per month, and billing is annual. The prices listed are base prices that could increase depending on your environment. Please speak to a representative to get a quote.
More Pricing Information
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User Ratings
IBM InstanaSolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
4.5
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM InstanaSolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability
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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For mid-market and larger, HCO provides a highly available single pane of glass. The user and group management provides a granular ability to deploy to the various areas of the support and engineering teams. Integration to ITSM platforms ensures that information from the platform flows in real time to the right people.
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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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  • unlimited APEs included
  • all modules under one platform
  • overall cost savings when compared to buying multiple APEs and modules, NetFlow NCM, Ipam, etc.
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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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  • Please fix the time zones issue. Events are in UTC, Charts in the user's Local Time, Alerts come in through with Main Server timestamp - it's all over the place & it's been like that for so long. We are a large corp, the teams span time zones and trying to work with teams across the globe is made so difficult by this.
  • The inability to ingest the tags from AWS Cloud watch and the countless posts / feature requests on thwack complaining about this that just get ignored. It's such a basic feature of Cloud & I don't want to have to own a different product to use such an fundamental part of cloud.
  • Maintenance Windows - why can we not set a reoccurring window from the web ui in 2022?
  • SAM - Manage applications, why is there no search bar to filter through applications. When you scale out to enterprise size this is so annoying trying to guess which page to land on to find the application / device I'm looking for.
  • http://hostname/Orion/APM/Admin/Applications/Default.aspx
  • Half baked features being released - Log Analyzer shipped with no resources for the node details page. The Free version from 2016 had more available in it.
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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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- decent ease of use - good training materials - good documentation - acceptable level of expected knowledge
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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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No answers on this topic
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 has the best overlap of the two others I've mentioned - the other two tools (Datadog and Dynatrace) are great in their own way but Solarwinds is just good at everything; if I had to pick one tool of the above, it would be Solarwinds for the compatibility and ease of use, the other tools are more focused on being great at certain things while Solarwinds is the jack of all trades.
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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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  • Helps us maintain application availability
  • Helps us shorten unplanned downtime
  • Provides these benefits at a fair price
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ScreenShots

SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability Screenshots

Screenshot of ITOM Executive DashboardScreenshot of Observability MapsScreenshot of Performance Analysis DashboardScreenshot of Application Alerting DashboardScreenshot of Network Path Analysis