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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)

    Sensu

    Score8 out of 10
    Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
    Sensu, now from Sumo Logic (acquired in June of 2021) is presented as a future-proof solution for multi-cloud monitoring at scale. The Sensu monitoring event pipeline is used by businesses to automate their monitoring workflows and gain visibility into their multi-cloud environments. The vendor boasts companies like Sony, Box.com, and Activision use Sensu to help deliver value to their customers. Sensu offers a comprehensive monitoring solution for enterprises, providing visibility across every…N/A
    Pricing
    IBM InstanaSensu
    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 InstanaSensu
    Free Trial
    YesYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
    Additional Details
    More Pricing Information
    Best Alternatives
    IBM InstanaSensu
    Small Businesses
    Amazon CloudWatch
    Score8.2 out of 10
    Amazon CloudWatch
    Score8.2 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Datadog
    Score8.4 out of 10
    Datadog
    Score8.4 out of 10
    Enterprises
    NetBrain Technologies
    Score9.2 out of 10
    NetBrain Technologies
    Score9.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    IBM InstanaSensu
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.5
    (30 ratings)
    8.6
    (2 ratings)
    Usability
    8.3
    (3 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    4.5
    (1 ratings)
    3.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    IBM InstanaSensu
    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
    Sumo Logic
    • Well suited for raising pagers when you have count-based metrics.
    • Well suited for threshold-based metrics.
    • Not well suited for tracking events over the day, since graphs and other visualizations are missing.
    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
    Sumo Logic
    • Unique concept as a "monitoring router" that can tie services together.
    • Backward-compatible with Nagios environments.
    • More of a DevOps focus than Nagios.
    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
    Sumo Logic
    • Cannot be solely used for tracking metrics over time.
    • Not a very good UI.
    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
    Sumo Logic
    No answers on this topic
    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
    Sumo Logic
    No answers on this topic
    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
    Sumo Logic
    Sensu's customer support was always willing to work with us but never really seemed to learn much from our experiences. I think they get a lot of customers with DevOps IT teams that are willing to put in a lot of elbow grease to get the most of Sensu's architecture. However, despite explaining my continued disappointment with their documentation and the overall flow of the product, I never got much more than a "sorry" and a notice that their documentation was open source if I wanted to contribute to it. The problem, of course, is that you can't document what you don't understand. I'm a former technical writer, so I know that better than most.
    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
    Sumo Logic
    Have used New Relic and Sematext Cloud for APM and for tracking over days and visualizing the issues. But those are very expensive as compared to Sensu.
    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
    Sumo Logic
    • Standing up the Sensu Go server took very little effort.
    • Setting up and maintaining the build processes and deployment logic for Sensu assets and checks was somewhat exhausting and resulted in lower adoption among non-DevOps IT.
    • The limited web interface resulted in lower adoption among non-DevOps IT.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Sensu Screenshots

    Screenshot of Sensu dashboard homepageScreenshot of Sensu dashboard namespace switcherScreenshot of Sensu events displayed in Grafana. In the examples above, Sensu is comfortably handling 40,000 Sensu agent connections (and their keepalives) and processing over 36,000 events per second.Screenshot of Sensu events displayed in Grafana. In the examples above, Sensu is comfortably handling 40,000 Sensu agent connections (and their keepalives) and processing over 36,000 events per second.