Grafana vs. IBM Instana

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Grafana
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Grafana is a data visualization tool developed by Grafana Labs in New York. It is available open source, managed (Grafana Cloud), or via an enterprise edition with enhanced features. Grafana has pluggable data source model and comes bundled with support for popular time series databases like Graphite. It also has built-in support for cloud monitoring vendors like Amazon Cloudwatch, Microsoft Azure and SQL databases like MySQL. Grafana can combine data from many places into a single dashboard.
$8
per month up to 1 active user
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
GrafanaIBM Instana
Editions & Modules
Grafana Cloud - Pro
$8
per month up to 1 active user
Grafana Cloud - Free
Free
10k metrics + 50GB logs + 50GB traces up to 3 active users
Grafana Cloud - Advanced
Volume Discounts
custom data usage custom active users
Grafana - Enterprise Stack
Custom Pricing
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
GrafanaIBM Instana
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GrafanaIBM Instana
Considered Both Products
Grafana
Chose Grafana
Easy to use
Easy to configure
Cost efficient
Chose Grafana
Grafana is more flexible, readily adopts other tools frameworks instead of forcing you to use their agent, doesn't force you into Vendor lock-in, and embraces open source, self-hosted, and Enterprise. Similar companies would like you to use their specific tooling and don't …
Chose Grafana
Grafana gives more flexibility to explore its features. A new user can explore experiment and work with free Grafana account and find if it is suitable for them.Other platforms don't have the features in their freemium version that Grafana has. It lets us try features of …
Chose Grafana
Grafana has a direct plugin to Icinga monitoring solution and allowed for easy configuration for us. At the time of implementation, other services did not have such an integration. As we already had a very customized and heavily introduced monitoring solution in place, we …
Chose Grafana
Grafana blows Nagios out of the water when it comes to customization. The ability to feed almost any data source makes it very versatile and the cost is great.
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
GrafanaIBM Instana
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.0
Ratings
5% below category average
IBM Instana
-
Ratings
Pixel Perfect reports6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Customizable dashboards10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
6.8
Ratings
16% below category average
IBM Instana
-
Ratings
Drill-down analysis6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Formatting capabilities8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages5.10 Ratings00 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.4
Ratings
0% below category average
IBM Instana
-
Ratings
Publish to Web7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Publish to PDF9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Versioning9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
7.7
Ratings
6% below category average
IBM Instana
-
Ratings
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Predictive Analytics7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GrafanaIBM Instana
Small Businesses
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 10.0 out of 10
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 10.0 out of 10
Logz.io
Logz.io
Score 7.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Dataiku
Dataiku
Score 7.6 out of 10
NetBrain Technologies
NetBrain Technologies
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GrafanaIBM Instana
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
8.6
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
8.3
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
4.5
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
GrafanaIBM Instana
Likelihood to Recommend
Just about any organization with more than one server and more than one cluster as it scales very well. Configuration of the application takes time and finesse to fine tune to where the balance of load time and getting data quickly meets. The plugins add load time but fine tuning for the application to meet demand needs nailed down at implementation
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.
Read full review
Pros
  • Alerting through many different medium as Slack, Email, Webhook etc
  • Beautiful and unlimited number of dashboards to view your metrics and tweak them as you please
  • Log aggregation and powerful Logql to filter and view your logs
  • Microservices monitoring
  • Large number of plugins and data sources to collect your metrics from almost anywhere
Read full review
  • 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
Read full review
Cons
  • Documentation needs to be more clarified since it can be confusing for beginners
  • Notification alert message templates need to be simplified
Read full review
  • 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.
Read full review
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
Great usage in terms of monitoring of any application from backend to frontend and even any AWS resource via cloud watch and other connectors. Easy to use and configure personalised dash boarding and alerting features. Cost efficient and easy to setup and run, no mazor scaling challenges in terms of managing and maintaining the stack, easy to configure via Prometheus, influx and other connectors
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Support Rating
No answers on this topic
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
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Grafana is more flexible, readily adopts other tools frameworks instead of forcing you to use their agent, doesn't force you into Vendor lock-in, and embraces open source, self-hosted, and Enterprise. Similar companies would like you to use their specific tooling and don't offer nearly as much flexibility. The other thing I like about Grafana is their storage usage is much lower compared to similar tools and competitors
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • It has kicked out some of our paid monitoring and visualization tools.
  • Now Monitoring, Visualization and Alerting is being done in a single platform.
  • It made monitoring and visualization very easy for us.
Read full review
  • 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