IBM Instana vs. Icinga

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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)
Icinga
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
Icinga is an open source network monitoring platform. It includes automation, modularized integration packages, and prebuilt alerts and reporting capabilities.N/A
Pricing
IBM InstanaIcinga
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 InstanaIcinga
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM InstanaIcinga
User Ratings
IBM InstanaIcinga
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
4.5
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM InstanaIcinga
Likelihood to Recommend
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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If you're running bare-metal in a datacenter and your hosts are fairly static, it's probably okay to use something like Icinga to monitor your systems. In general, I would not recommend using any monitoring software based on Nagios (Icinga is a fork of Nagios) due to the outdated concepts inherent in those systems. There are a number of good SaaS monitoring solutions which are superior and several open source projects which implement an automation-centric approach to monitoring
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Pros
  • 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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  • I think Icinga has a great search feature. I can always search for the hosts, host groups, or check names. When using just regular Nagios, I don't recall being able to do this search.
  • The fact that I can use Active Directory or LDAP for logins is a great feature.
  • If you are familiar with Nagios, it's very simple to combine the two products to get a polished finished product.
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Cons
  • 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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  • Decluttering - the dashboard seems to get very overwhelming
  • Segregation - would be helpful to split environments or clients into different areas
  • Alerting
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Likelihood to Renew
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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Icinga is a solid solution which does everything it promises. It is backwards compatible with most Nagios instances, making the transition very easy. Once you get the hang of installing new plugins and editing configuration files expanding its monitoring capabilities are easy.
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Usability
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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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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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Icinga was initially a fork of Nagios. Over time, the configuration language was replaced with something more programmatic. This configuration language is one of the big sellers of this product. It allows flexible, quick configuration of large sets of hosts and services with minimal input. Comparing it to other products like WhatsUp Gold, Zenoss, Zabbix, etc., it stands out as incredibly flexible. Adding additional features to Icinga can be as simple as searching for them online. And if they don't yet exist, there is a full API available for custom extensions.
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Return on Investment
  • 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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  • With one check you know which applications are faulty e.g. after an upgrade. Which is big time saver
  • You easily detect outages ion the applications so that your customer ideally does not even realize there was an outage.
  • Detect if the environment does deliver the same result as in the same time as before to detect shortages.
  • Additional information when debugging. Saved us several hours where we could simply point to a database which was slow.
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ScreenShots