DX Application Performance Management vs. IBM Instana

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
DX Application Performance Management
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
DX Application Performance Management (formerly CA APM, or CA Application Performance Management) is an application performance management platform designed to correlate and analyze data in real-time. DX APM supports hybrid environments and customizable failure thresholds.N/A
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)
Pricing
DX Application Performance ManagementIBM 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
DX Application Performance ManagementIBM Instana
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DX Application Performance ManagementIBM Instana
Considered Both Products
DX Application Performance Management
Chose DX Application Performance Management
We only have 1 application using DX APM, while most of other applications are instrumented using Dynatrace. Dynatrace provides a better monitoring and instrumentation for applications. The required effort to setup monitoring capability using DX APM is way more work compared …
Chose DX Application Performance Management
DX Application Performance Management can never compete with Dynatrace, New Relic, or AppDynamics. DX Application Performance Management was selected as a preferred vendor not on actual requirements, use cases, or effectiveness. You would be better using a log search tool or no …
Chose DX Application Performance Management
We used Dynatrace for years and got very little value out of the product. The sales staff sold the product and disappeared and the technical staff provided little value to actually help us get value from the product. We moved to CA because it was less expensive and met our …
Chose DX Application Performance Management
CA Application Performance Management (APM) is the solution global brands trust to proactively identify and resolve performance and availability issues across physical, virtual, cloud, and mobile applications. CA APM is easy, proactive, intelligent and collaborative, so every …
Chose DX Application Performance Management
App Dynamics seems to be far easier to instrument and has little overhead for additional configurations. While Team Center is a nice addition to the overall APM process. I feel it needs to be more streamlined in how to implement and configure. Not having a universal console for …
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.
Features
DX Application Performance ManagementIBM Instana
Application Performance Management
Comparison of Application Performance Management features of Product A and Product B
DX Application Performance Management
3.7
Ratings
69% below category average
IBM Instana
-
Ratings
Application monitoring3.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Database monitoring3.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Threshold alerts3.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Predictive capabilities4.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Application performance management console3.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Collaboration tools4.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications4.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Application dependency mapping and thresholding4.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Virtualization monitoring4.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Server availability and performance monitoring3.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting4.00 Ratings00 Ratings
IT Asset Discovery4.00 Ratings00 Ratings
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User Ratings
DX Application Performance ManagementIBM Instana
Likelihood to Recommend
3.2
(0 ratings)
8.6
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.3
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
2.5
(0 ratings)
4.5
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DX Application Performance ManagementIBM Instana
Likelihood to Recommend
Any other APM product is vastly superior. This product's interface, lack of automated instrumentation, and just ridiculous false parity with other APM products is the laughing stock of the industry. In our use case, we have no other APM tools so we attempt to use and in 1 case out of 10 did we actually find a reported metric that was actually related to the root cause. We spent four hours parsing metric output graphs and hierarchy trees to find it. If CA is your preferred vendor and you like washing your clothes by hand instead of using an automated appliance then this tool is for you
Read full review
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
  • CA APM supports .Net and Java applications which are the strong areas of CA APM. It does very well in banking solutions where we are able to meet our business requirements.
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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
  • There is a steep learning curve with the tool which can make it at times daunting to use.
  • APM can at times be fickle with what it can and cannot track as far as performance metrics go.
  • Other than Team Center, the rest of the pieces of the tool aren't as intuitive and require more time to instrument.
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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
No answers on this topic
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
No answers on this topic
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
We have never received any support from CA on this product
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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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Alternatives Considered
CA Application Performance Management (APM) is the solution global brands trust to proactively identify and resolve performance and availability issues across physical, virtual, cloud, and mobile applications. CA APM is easy, proactive, intelligent and collaborative, so every user transaction becomes a loyalty-building interaction. CA Application Performance Management is an application lifecycle management solution for businesses of all sizes while we tried to use Dynatrace but as we get more familiar with CA Wily by the time we analyzed Dynatrace, we were interested to use it and see the results how it goes.
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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
  • APM has allowed us to customize a dashboard view for each specific application. This allows for unique monitoring of top functions and unique alerts. It is awesome for this use.
  • APM allows us better data and faster alerting compared to previous products. We moved away from another product because it was not reporting on problems accurately.
  • Once set up, APM requires little management and overhead time. The setup can be somewhat time consuming, but once setup we see no issues
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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