IBM Instana vs. Splunk Observability Cloud

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)
Splunk Observability Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Splunk Observability Cloud aims to enable operational agility and better customer experience through real-time AI-driven streaming analytics allowing accurate alerts in seconds. It is designed to shorten MTTD and MTTR by providing real-time visibility into cloud infrastructure and services.
$15
per month (billed annually) per host
Pricing
IBM InstanaSplunk Observability Cloud
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)
Infrastructure
$15
per month (billed annually) per host
App & Infra
$60
per month (billed annually) per host
End-to-End
$75
per month (billed annually) per host
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM InstanaSplunk Observability Cloud
Free Trial
YesYes
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 InstanaSplunk Observability Cloud
Considered Both Products
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.
Splunk Observability Cloud
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
To be honest, Datadog is very similar to Splunk and LogScale to a lesser degree, but it is just as good if you don't need too complex observability. Grafana is still growing and might reach the same level soon.
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
Tenable Cloud Security and SolarWinds Kiwi Syslog Server
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
It's able to quickly detect and resolve issues across the entire spectrum of deployments including on-premises, public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud and multicloud
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
The above applications have their own use cases. Thousand Eyes or Sitescope is used for URL monitoring and Splunk is used for application monitoring. Appdynamics is also used for application monitoring and can monitor the server very well but it lacks when searching in logs …
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
It has edge because of our existing logging solutions is Splunk
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
Splunk is superior in many ways to these solutions when I'm comes to ingesting, storing, manipulating, and using data, but dynatraces automatic agents do make it much easier to use out of the box. Nagios seems much cheaper but does not provide as much functionality as Splunk. …
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
Because it's very easy to use & detailed and I love the graphics you feel everything under control any issue you can track it immediately
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
New Relic has more deep into the application using agents.
We try to use them in parallel to find errors in the infrastructure.
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
I had not considered other products because Splunk Log Observer was in use in my company before I started working there.
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
We believe that it's less vulnerable to security aspects as compared to others.
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
Splunk requires less work for data in gestion and parsing. Splunk has more efficient data display features.
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
Splunk Log Observer provides easy setup and ease of admin features and direction of product was better compared to Lightstep
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
Splunk is easy to customize and ingest our data. It is far more understandable and secure than other applications.
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
SQL is a great tool for smaller quick checks. When trying to monitor several different environments, applications, APIs, several thousand devices, connections, and technology, it just doesn't stand up to what you need. Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring has really stood out …
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
We are having other monitoring tools like AppDynamics, Dynatrace, Datadog and already using their end-user monitoring capability. Most of our customers are looking for agent-free monitoring where they don't want to instrument any agent on their client-side (as it might …
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring provides far superior options for anybody using a complex hybrid multi-cloud environment and allows both your SOC and NOC to work together on the same data while driving their own insights.

We found other products are still in the old world view …
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
The tool was deployed over most of the major applications on the client-side.
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
The use of a single integration and definition of custom metrics, and tags is a great advantage. The ability to use SignalFlow to observe metrics in addition to the vast number of out-of-the-box dashboards is also excellent.
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring is the only product of its kind that I've used and I've been very happy with it.
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
government is hesitant of choosing a solarwinds product for security purposes
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
Much more powerful
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM) has a much better artificial intelligence engine. It also has a much better and more intuitive user interface. Splunk RUM also allows end-to-end visibility into the front and the backend. Technical support and customer service are also much …
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IBM InstanaSplunk Observability Cloud
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User Ratings
IBM InstanaSplunk Observability Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(0 ratings)
8.6
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
6.4
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
4.5
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM InstanaSplunk Observability Cloud
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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The query language is relatively easy and flexible when looking into an application's problems. These queries can then be used for alerts, reports, and dashboards. I believe Splunk is a platform that can help a system grow into its proactive application management, using incidents to add insights as needed without trying to work out every scenario in advance.
Read full review
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
Read full review
  • The first one is its Kubernetes container monitoring.
  • I really like this features because as we know how much K8s is vast and to manually monitor each part of the Kubernetes it takes so much time but Splunk Observability Cloud makes it easier. And even once we integrate K8s with Splunk Observability Cloud it gives us some prebuilt dashboards which gives holistic view of our Cluster and its nodes, pods, etc.
  • The dashbaord feature of Splunk Observability Cloud, it gives us full flexibility to customize our dashboard with a wide range of predefined chart types.
  • Now it also supports OTEL, which is a plus point for observability. As now everyone is moving towards Otel and in current market there are only few tools who supports OTEL based integrations, Splunk Observability Cloud is one out of them.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
  • An indicator for errors on the navigations pane so that we don't have to go through each tab.
  • As we go more and more cloud maybe you guys can implement a pay-as-you-use strategy so that small companies using it not frequently can also afford it.
  • That's it can't think of any and it wont let me skip to next question. Thanks
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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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Good: Stable system with low error rate Easy to use for simple use cases Bad: UI is not very clear for complex usage Mobile view (when logged in from phone) is bad No library for .net
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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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When there is an issue, it’s a win if one can easily identify the root cause. To do the same, it should allow the user to dig deep with multiple data points and compare the data and identify the anomaly. In this use case, it’s good to drive from Splunk 011y.
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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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Splunk support is very quick and efficient. Pre-sale specialists are very skilled and available.
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
Follow a training before starting.
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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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We initially chose Splunk Observability Cloud because it promised full-stack visibility and tighter integration. The other tools didn't offer this as part of the core package. Their analytics and real-time dashboards looked strong during the demo but it turned out to a lot heavier and more complex than expected. If I had to decide again, I’d probably go with something more streamlined and easier to manage.
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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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  • Significantly reduced the MTTR (Mean Time To Recovery), which in turn has improved the end-user experience tremendously.
  • Meets compliance requirements of security policies, audit, regulation, and forensics.
  • Helps us to track/manage the resource usage on our cloud instances which has a direct implication on the recurring cost.
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ScreenShots

Splunk Observability Cloud Screenshots

Screenshot of Real-time monitoring for public, private and hybrid cloud