Catchpoint vs. IBM Instana

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Catchpoint
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Catchpoint is an Internet Resilience solution offering services for retailers, Global2000, CDNs, cloud service providers, and xSPs that help increase their resilience by catching any issues in the Intenet Stack before they impact their business.N/A
IBM Instana
Score 8.0 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)
Pricing
CatchpointIBM Instana
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
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)
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CatchpointIBM Instana
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details- White glove migration services - Annual subscription - Professional Services - Competitive Benchmarking
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
CatchpointIBM Instana
Considered Both Products
Catchpoint
Chose Catchpoint
We see limited options while adding tests on mentioned compared to CP.
Chose Catchpoint
Compare Catchpoint with the side score, Catchpoint gives us some more feasibility regarding monetary as point provides both agent based and agent less monitoring, but side to provide us some agent with monetary, so that’s the major difference between both these tools. Also …
Chose Catchpoint
Catchpoint doesn't have a feature set that is as full but can provide many similar features for much less.
Chose Catchpoint
I have not used any other product similar to Catchpoint, or we can say I never felt the need to check out other products.
Chose Catchpoint
Lightweight and efficient for Production environment monitoring
Chose Catchpoint
Datadog, Prometheus, Kibana and OpenTelemetry
Chose Catchpoint
More specialties and locations.
Chose Catchpoint
Catchpoint is great for Synthetic monitoring, alerting, general internet reporting, and fully understanding all types of data around edge services. They don't do a lot of internal tracing or application monitoring right now, but we have leveraged their Enterprise servers within …
Chose Catchpoint
Smart Bear Foglight Dynatrace CEM Catchpoint: I have used many synthetic monitoring products. Honestly, there are no big differences in features among all the products listed above or that I have used before. Probably, price and support might play big roles in selecting the …
Chose Catchpoint
In my opinion Catchpoint has not lost focus on synthetics like Dynatrace has. Catchpoint is increasing investment in its core monitoring network, while Dynatrace has shut down its backbone monitoring network.
Chose Catchpoint
Mainly was the extremely high availability across the whole world. Especially China.
Chose Catchpoint
Catchpoint as a product provides comprehensive tools to help orchestrate real-world synthetic monitoring capabilities. Coding & payload development language easy to use and manage. The user management features could use some additional features to help make managing user & …
Chose Catchpoint
Both products are similar and have similar challenges but the Dynatrace pricing model is not as competitive as Catchpoint.
Chose Catchpoint
Catchpoint offers similar capabilities with better pricing.
Chose Catchpoint
Catchpoint is the trusted solution for monitoring our application. It provides an intuitive UI create monitoring screens for all of our rest endpoints and web UI. The email alerts send out by Catchpoint are so detailed and visually clear. We were able to figure out the time of …
Chose Catchpoint
Catchpoint's node deployment, especially on the LM and mobile locations is one of the best I have seen. It helps us to debug better.
Chose Catchpoint
Primary reason was the numbers of Pops available.
Chose Catchpoint
Catchpoint offers a complete platform. You get different options of synthetic monitoring in one place, kinda what we were going after. Web Transaction, Network Tests, Mobile Tests, HTML Code, API Tests, DNS Tests, SMTP Tests, IMAP, BGP, etc. The list goes on and on. This …
Chose Catchpoint
Catchpoint meets the needs of their business better than Azure Monitor. We also got the free trial version which we didn't get in Azure network protector hence it helped us try and use the Catchpoint system and help us decide to ahead with the Catchpoint solution. Catchpoint is …
IBM Instana
Chose IBM Instana
IBM Instana is great for infrastructure monitoring while AppDynamics is ahead in application monitoring
Chose IBM Instana
We chose IBM Instana for its very affordable price, the ease of use of the solution, which was perfectly suited to our needs and specifications, and the feedback from our teams, who had no trouble getting to grips with it in a very short time.The IBM Instana solution is very …
Chose IBM Instana
IBM Instana provides 60 seconds granularity whereas the other products use time series data
IBM Instana automatically detects the Service Endpoints which helps us trace all the calls pinpointed to service endpoints.
IBM Instana provides complete Auto Discovery with no …
Chose IBM Instana
Well again, it comes back to the application monitor. It does a better job than SolarWinds.
Chose IBM Instana
Automatic application discovery with one agent installation instead of manual configuration for each application and multiply agents for each technology stack.

Automatic tracing for application calls without the need to add complex configuration and application instrumentation.
Chose IBM Instana
BMC TrueSight Automation for Networks and Dynatrace
Chose IBM Instana
1- ROI is higher as the budget is much less than other
2- the way of calculating license is much better and fit us and this affect the ROI
3- the ease of implementation
Chose IBM Instana
The primary reason we choose IBM Instana was that is was compatible with nearly all of our apps without requiring any modifications to our code. We are really happy that we decided to adopt IBM Instana.
Chose IBM Instana
because of support and better agents for non containeraized workloads, virtual machines and lpars
Chose IBM Instana
IBM Instana meet LMRA requirements, as IBM Instana is more useful to deep-dive each transaction from Real-user monitoring itself when compared to other APM's in the market. Also gives more flexibility especially from the support perspective to identify bottlenecks and to …
Chose IBM Instana
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, …
Chose IBM Instana
Splunk is also a wonderful tool for log analysis and operational troubleshooting however auto discovery and dependency flow creation makes Instana standout. We have to do a lot of preprocessing to ingest and format data in Splunk and then write complex queries for gathering the …
Chose IBM Instana
We chose IBM Instana for several reasons, and the most important one is that we didn't have to make changes in our code for nearly all of our applications for it to work. We are happy with the decision we made to use IBM Instana.
Chose IBM Instana
We have used them and for the moment we have chosen IBM Instana first of all because of the price because it is accessible and it works in terms of the results we have obtained, also the way of presenting the schemes and the performance of the systems is very good.
Chose IBM Instana
Superior value for money, simpler license approach with automated functions (installation, detection, update, and alarm). Nothing can stop IBM Instana's footprints in the international market as it progressively gains strength and grows in the market. With fair and inexpensive …
Chose IBM Instana
New Relic has it's own perks but when it comes to large infrastructure, we always face some issue at stability but IBM Instana never fails here. In my opinion, Inbuilt dashboard and inbuilt alerting feature what makes IBM Instana better than compared to other tools. I think …
Chose IBM Instana
In my experience, they both have independent strengths and shortcomings, though I have found IBM Instana to be much better for general monitoring and setting up alerts to get ahead of any problems. Contrastly, I think humio/falcon has been easier to use when it comes to …
Chose IBM Instana
We selected IBM Instana because of better support and other products that complement each other.
Chose IBM Instana
We selected IBM Instana because it is more accurate than Datadog.
Best Alternatives
CatchpointIBM Instana
Small Businesses
SolarWinds Pingdom
SolarWinds Pingdom
Score 9.7 out of 10
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cisco ThousandEyes
Cisco ThousandEyes
Score 8.9 out of 10
Logz.io
Logz.io
Score 7.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Nexthink
Nexthink
Score 7.0 out of 10
NetBrain Technologies
NetBrain Technologies
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
CatchpointIBM Instana
Likelihood to Recommend
9.2
(0 ratings)
8.6
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.1
(0 ratings)
8.3
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.7
(0 ratings)
4.5
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
CatchpointIBM Instana
Likelihood to Recommend
Proactive Website and API performance testing, Synthetic monitoring, and third-party integration are where Catchpoint is best suited. Catchpoint is less appropriate in Deep Application Performance monitoring, debugging complex user journeys in real-time, Small businesses, and Mobile app performance monitoring. These are the scenarios where I find Catchpoint is well-suited and scenarios where it is less appropriate.
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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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Pros
  • Catchpoint Synthetics: We create our synthetic monitoring using catchpoint. Creating the synthetics monitors are easy and requires basic knowledge on selenium and javascript. It allows you to run the test from external(backbone) and internal enterprise nodes. The screenshot and filmstrip feature is an add-on along with various customisations. Once created, It provides a detailed insight of each request that is involved in the application flow which helps us in addressing the issue at the request level.
  • Catchpoint API Test: This is another kind of test which we have explored in our organisation. This has helped us to maintain the health check of our APIs and also we have utilised it for a variety of our use cases.
  • Catchpoint Dashboard: This is our one-stop shop for all our monitors. It has multiple widgets that displays various application performance metrics. We use this feature immensely and it is of great value to the business.
  • Catchpoint UI: It is very user friendly and with basic introduction anyone can just get started with it.
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  • 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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Cons
  • The ability to monitor the Catchpoint nodes with the ability to setup a take a recovery action based on specific criteria
  • The ability to tell us when we are at X% capacity so that we better plan or budget for increasing the "capacity" of the Catchpoint nodes before we get to an overloaded state. The capacity utilization graph is not a reliable indicator for this metric. How can the capacity utilization rate get above 100%, it does not make sense
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  • 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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Likelihood to Renew
we are heavily dependent catchpoint system for the following functions * Detect end-user availability/performance-related problems * Ensures
service level objectives (SLO) are met, that prevents service level
agreement (SLA) breaches * Identify and understand the cause of any
network connectivity or application level issue * Improves the
availability and response time service levels
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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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Usability
It's hard to find the functionalities that I am looking for in the application. Even if I did something in the past, after a time I have to re-learn again where the functionalities are. This is a powerful tool, but not user-friendly. Texts in the buttons and menus are not always meaningful or easily comprehensible.
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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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Support Rating
The customer support is fantastic as they keep you updated and follow up even though we may not even follow up. Make sure they send a communication so that we remain updated. They value engineers who will get on a call with you to understand any requirement we have on any test, and they bring in the best developers on call.
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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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Implementation Rating
very easy to implement as the product is user-friendly
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Datadog is good, but more expensive. New Relic is good but does not provide the same features as Catchpoint does. Checkly is good, but Catchpoint offers different frameworks to create synthetic tests, which is preferable to my engineering team.
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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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Return on Investment
  • Catchpoint points based licensing for public hosted nodes is complicated and unpredictable in points required.
  • Catchpoint lacks AI powered anomaly detection and automated remediation. This gap means more manual triage and slower MTTR during incidents.
  • The advanced 360 degree blackbox monitoring is enabling us to monitor the APIs, UI and proactively gain insights into the application behavior and performance before customer is impacted.
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  • 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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ScreenShots