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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    IBM Instana

    Score8 out of 10
    N/AInstana, 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.

    $75

    per month per Managed Virtual Server (MVS)

    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

    Score6.9 out of 10
    N/ASolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers application and server monitoring capabilities. SAM allows for self-service for easy setup, 1200+ monitoring templates, and customization options, as well as integrate with other SolarWinds products.N/A
    Pricing
    IBM InstanaSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    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 InstanaSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Free Trial
    YesYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details—SAM pricing starts at $2,995.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    IBM InstanaSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Considered Both Products
    IBM
    No answer on this topic
    SolarWinds
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Would buy again
    33 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    31 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    33 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    26 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    93%
    Implementation went as expected
    28 Answers
    Features
    IBM InstanaSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Application Performance Management
    Comparison of Application Performance Management features of IBM Instana and SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Feature
    IBM Instana
    -
    Ratings
    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    8.6
    276 Ratings
    12% above category average
    Application monitoring00 Ratings8.9266 Ratings
    Database monitoring00 Ratings8.4230 Ratings
    Threshold alerts00 Ratings8.9271 Ratings
    Predictive capabilities00 Ratings8.2215 Ratings
    Application performance management console00 Ratings8.2239 Ratings
    Collaboration tools00 Ratings7.7148 Ratings
    Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications00 Ratings7.8256 Ratings
    Application dependency mapping and thresholding00 Ratings8.5216 Ratings
    Virtualization monitoring00 Ratings8.8234 Ratings
    Server availability and performance monitoring00 Ratings9.8269 Ratings
    Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting00 Ratings9.1250 Ratings
    IT Asset Discovery00 Ratings9.0199 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    IBM InstanaSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Small Businesses
    Amazon CloudWatch
    Score8.2 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    Datadog
    Score8.4 out of 10
    SolarWinds AppOptics
    Score8.1 out of 10
    Enterprises
    NetBrain Technologies
    Score9.2 out of 10
    Splunk AppDynamics
    Score8.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    IBM InstanaSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.5
    (30 ratings)
    8.8
    (278 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.9
    (10 ratings)
    Usability
    8.3
    (3 ratings)
    8.6
    (29 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.9
    (3 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.0
    (3 ratings)
    Support Rating
    4.5
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (21 ratings)
    Online Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    4.5
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    4.5
    (3 ratings)
    Configurability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    1.0
    (2 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    4.5
    (2 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.9
    (3 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    4.5
    (2 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    4.5
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    IBM InstanaSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Likelihood to Recommend
    IBM
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    For monitoring applications that run on Windows hosts on VMware or HyperV virtualization, SolarWindows offers a nice, vertical view of both the loads and the resources. In such an environment, this makes life really good! But if you have something else -- for example, Linux hosts -- you're on your own to some extent. That is, the things it does well, it does very well -- but everything else is much less polished.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    IBM
    • Can monitor application(s) and system(s) with very large throughput of transactions by the second ( it gets everything !!!)
    • Provide strong drill down for your applications and will tell you where the points of failure of an application's is ( servers , network , Databases , etc you name it )
    • Very easy to set up and have it up and running when using the SaaS solution. There's an on premise solution which works just as well but requires more effort and preparation from an infrastructure point of view for your teams to implement.
    • Continuously improve their features and their agents auto-update and keep up. All while not interfering with your applications.
    • Let's you create your own dashboards and visualizations that can be tailored for different kind of users with the data collected.
    • Create your own events and smart alerts so you can know on the spot if something is happening or is likely to happen that needs addressing on your applications / systems
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    • Monitor Azure Cloud Severs- We use SolarWinds SAM to monitor Active Directory and DNS on Several DCs published on Azure Cloud.
    • Monitor Hyper V and VMware - SolarWinds SAM monitors applications on both Hyper V and VMware, while also monitoring the physical host machines.
    • It also helps us monitor Warranty expiration for physical servers.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    IBM
    • It's very difficult to create custom dashboards, only a handful of scenarios can be visualized to dashboards.
    • Extracting information from Instana to further analysis into excel for example is something that can be improved. Using an API to get data is very limiting.
    • Open telemetry features which allow to send application data to Instana is not working as documented.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    • Provides basic monitoring/visibility. Visibility into detailed/fine-grained issues best suited for more specialized/expensive solutions.
    • Licensing per monitored application rapidly uses up purchased license count.
    • More out-of-the-box templates or easier setup of monitoring less-common applications would make the solution more appealing given the target audience of the product.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    IBM
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    We are heavily invested in Solarwinds products for a reason. They are generally easy to setup and run with, requiring only some interfacing with support or help articles on rare occasions. They do what we bought them to do and we can't ask for more.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    IBM
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is quite easy to use and super versatile. It allows you to do just about anything you can through premade templates or through scripting. You can use an agent on the servers if you want to, or you can monitor through WMI or SNMP credentials. You can customize thresholds for alerting quickly, and you can configure alerts to be as complex or as simple as you want.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    The tool works and monitors items 24x7, it only requires maintenance a little more frequently due to security fixes in the Windows operating system.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    The graphical interface and the performance of the database leave a little to be desired, they could be better explored.Some functionality and screens do not work well depending on the browser used. The integrations never had any problems or caused crashes in other systems.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    IBM
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    I think there was only a couple times I had to open a support case for SAM and one time they got multiple engineers on the phone to get a better idea what I was trying to monitor and was able to point me in the best direction to monitor that system.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Online Training
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    It was sufficient to read their documentation and watch videos.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    Make sure SNMP and WMI are configured ahead of time
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    IBM
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    It has been a while since we first purchased SolarWinds, but I looked over several other products that I can't remember now. Many other products tried to scan the network to find computers but given that our computers are located in various places across campus with other computers in our buildings that are not ours that type of network scanning was not what we needed. Other services have extra services that we had no need of and I liked the ability to add custom fields in SolarWinds so we can track the information on each computer that we need to know.
    Read full review
    Scalability
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    It is hard to find the recommended SQL setup and convince others that is the way you should configure the server when you set it up
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    IBM
    • Increase up time by early failure identification and performance optimization based on findings in Instana.
    • Enhance user experience by mapping user issues with backend failures
    • Automated actions help fixing known issues without human intervention
    • increase support team efficiency by root cause analysis which decrease the incident solving time
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    • Less time spent investigating causes of issues. We are alerted straight away and can find the root cause of the issue in less time.
    • We have been able to ditch all our previous individual monitoring solutions, none of which integrated with each other for a single solution which fully integrates with each of the different modules to provide a single portal for monitoring and alerting.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Screenshots

    Screenshot of Multi-vendor application performance monitoringScreenshot of Multi-vendor server monitoringScreenshot of Application dependency mapping with AppStack™ dashboardScreenshot of Microsoft Exchange performance monitoring with AppInsight™ templateScreenshot of Microsoft IIS performance monitoring with AppInsight™ templateScreenshot of Server hardware health monitoring