Instana Reviews
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Write a ReviewVlad P
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
What do you like best?
Instana offers a large variety of features at a simple, fixed pricing model. Besides the usual distributed tracing and error logging, Instana offers infrastructure monitoring, StatsD collection, web and mobile monitoring, as well as highly customizable views and alerts. Setting up an Instana agent was extremely easy (we used the Ruby on Rails / Kubernetes integration). The logging is unsampled and customizable. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike?
The UI has a steep learning curve if you're used to other APM software. Expect to learn a lot of new terminology and configuration options before you can set up a usable dashboard. Unlike other APM providers, Instana gives you a great deal of flexibility in how data is presented -- which is great for expert users, but novices will almost certainly be lost. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Michael B
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
What do you like best?
The Account Manager and Product Managers are very available and easy to work with. They are eager to help and hear us for any questions, concerns, or feature requests my team has. Aside from their amazing team, the Instana product itself is great and has proven to be a critical part of our platform. The ability to debug issues and find the root causes is critical to preventing those issues in the future. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike?
Initially the product was difficult to navigate as there are so many features and services it provides. But documentation has since gotten much better and the Account Managers are always willing to jump on a call and help out with any questions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Florian G
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
What do you like best?
We moved from Zabbix to Instana. With the rollout of the Instana agents on our servers we more or less out of the box got much better insights into our system landscape and application performance:
- Easy to setup
- Automated discovery
- Coverage of supported technologies
- Detailed infrastructure monitoring
- Flexible configuration of applications used for APM - great for monitoring micro services
Support from Instana is great. Usually you get very fast response on your questions.
When features are not supported by the existing supported technologies there is a good chance to get them implemented or find an alternative solution using generic metric reporters like statsd. Already looking forward for release 191 to get MySQL replication status support.
Special thanks to our Customer Success Manager Zeynep. You are doing a great job and helped us a lot whenever needed. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike?
We are using a lot custom metrics. Configuring events for them is limited. Instana itself is more powerful. The built-in events use more sophisticated rules like changes over a period of time. However they are not available for custom metrics.
Analytics on infrastructure metrics. The comparison tables provided by Instana do not support all metrics. This is a limitation for us. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Grégory S
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
What do you like best?
* Customer success management, just perfect, you're really treated as a customer should be (thanks Z. Y.)
* Highly reactive and skilled support and engineers, any tickets is always quickly and properly handled
* Very interactive development, improvements are very regular, Feature Request taken into account, Instana listens to their customers
* Transparent company, they don't try to hide things, everyone is honest and fair Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike?
* Incident / Alerting could be improved, with better scoping
* Not something I literally dislike, but as a quite small customer, I'm worried by the IBM acquisition Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Fagner L
Site Reliability Engineer | SRE
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Review source: Organic
What do you like best?
Trabalho atualmente conectado o dia todo no Instana e também usei nos meus 3 ultimos trabalhos.
A implantação é muito simples e o tempo para começar a entregar valor é muito rápido.
As demais ferramentas do mercado são muito complexas comparadas ao Instana.
Nosso processo de treinamento e rollout do conhecimento é muito rápido pois a ferramenta é bem intuitiva. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike?
Só tive problemas no passado com implantação em .net muito antigo, mas com PHP e linguagens atualizadas é tudo bem simples. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Miguel Angel R
Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Review source: Organic
What do you like best?
A simple and clean deployment process, a vast variety of technologies for agent instrumentation, continuous updates, notifications, custom dashboards, third party integrations via rest API, etc. I really like that Instana listens to their users since is easy to request features and get them implemented. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike?
The support process needs more attention. Is not easy to address critical issues in a fast way due to the lack of effectiveness to reach an experienced engineer. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Ashwin S
DevOps Lead
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Review source: Organic
What do you like best?
Ease of Usage is very simple and the co-relation of alerts with downstream services which helps us to reduce the MTTR and improve MTTI. Also, they have a very nice managed documentation which makes the integration very easy. They have the best Automatic Root Cause Analysis of Microservices to give us a deeper insight into a complex environment that we have. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike?
We were surprised to see the dashboarding capabilities tool provides, I am sure they are will build a better solution as they did for observability Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
aaron w
Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
What do you like best?
distributed tracing shows the volume and type of traffic between application components as well as how long each call within a trace takes.
follow-your-nose breadcrumb paradigm: everything is clickable, link-able, and related
monitoring and alerting capabilities
intuitive design and easy to understand ui
instrumentation of almost any technology
super easy installation for any type of environment, whether k8s, bare-metal, or containerized
low-configuration Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike?
nothing too mentionable really. the only thing that could be better right now is creating alerts based off of information in the ui and perhaps better or more flexible visualization in-product. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Josiel B
Infrastructure Management
Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
What do you like best?
We used Instana on the last Black Friday and it was a great experience and helped to identify some issues. The Dev guys use Instana on a daily basis and like it a lot. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike?
It don´t have a infrastructure vision yeat, but the Instana´s guys are worked in this feature! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
AF
Administrator in Financial Services
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
What do you like best?
- GUI is intuitive and easy to navigate
- Automatic discovery, just install the agents and start monitoring
- A bird's eye view to Kubernetes cluster
- Several available notification channel types e.g. Slack, Teams, Email
- Helpful and friendly people
- Continuous updates and new features are released often Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike?
- Sometimes it has taken very long to get a reply when submitting a support case through customer portal Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Leonardo M
Principal Software Engineer
Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
What do you like best?
Instana allow us to troubleshoot issues easily. But Instana really shines to bring up problems and warnings before it becomes an issue by monitoring the system as a whole.
The capacity of deep-dive from an AWS host with issues into the container into the application is amazing and makes our lives much easier.
The support team was always fast to reply and solve issues together - also to provide way to improve the integration and monitoring.
It allows to create alarms to notify about issues is great too. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike?
To be honest no one likes to know that your application has issues - the Instana discover them all. Most importantly they are reported in an easy way to triage and give them priority to be fixed. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Rick M
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
What do you like best?
Works well with containers and priced well. Easy to install in our container environment. Intuitive interface. Easy to see any ongoing issues. We are able to send alerts to Slack. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike?
We initially reached out shortly after hearing about them at re:Invent. It did take a bit of time to get back with us probably due to the volume of the requests. Once we connected and did a proof of concept everything went well. For the most part, issues were addressed quickly, but a few times it took a while to address an issue, but over the past year everything has been going smoothly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Thiago F
Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
What do you like best?
I like the simplicity and the flexibility in to deploy the Instana and make it works.
The support provided by their Team is awesome, they accept suggestion and provided the proper training for our development teams. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike?
I don't have any point related with the cons. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
AR
Administrator in Retail
Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
What do you like best?
- customer feedback really matters
- quick and fast support team
- technical problems are verified and checked really in detail with the customer (whether on Instana side or customer side)
- often new features
- good and frequent contact between Instana and the customer Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike?
- using Instana for a classic 24/7 On Call Duty isn't the best way. They're doing very well, but it's still an APM tool. You can do it, but it's not the best way for classic infrastructures.
- long time of stability and reliability issues, but they're gone (it has been really worked hard on it)
- sometimes old features get less attention and fail in work during updates of new ones Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Fabio C
Sales Enginieer
Small-Business(50 or fewer emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Review source: Organic
Business partner of the seller or seller's competitor, not included in G2 scores.
What do you like best?
O Instana proporciona uma excelente visão de infraestrutura e visão de aplicação para os times de SRE,DEVOPS e DEV.
A ferramenta é de fácil utilização e compreensão para analise de troubleshooting. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike?
Um dos pontos que mais me encantou é possível fazer o tracer desde do browser do usuário até todas as camadas de aplicações. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
AE
Administrator in Education Management
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
What do you like best?
Quick and easy dashboard. Support for Kubernetes and Openshift. The Node.js Collector is very comprehensive and is kept up-to-date with frequent updates. Nice selection of charts and graphs and most queries are very responsive. I also love that you can bookmark any page and share it or return to it later. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike?
GUI changes often and sometimes significantly making navigation difficult because it constantly changes. Sometimes there are too many updates to the instana collector so I find us releasing new versions to constantly stay current.
I also wish there was more long term trending. After 1 month, all data is "estimated" and I find that it becomes pretty worthless because it's so inaccurate. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
AR
Administrator in Retail
Small-Business(50 or fewer emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
Jean-Bastien K
Business Development Manager
Small-Business(50 or fewer emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
What do you like best?
The one agent installation and autotracing of all our technologies and the one at our clients. They are really close of the clients in order to take back their feedbacks and implement them in the new releases. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike?
The lack of some connections with alerting tools. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
AH
Administrator in Human Resources
Small-Business(50 or fewer emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
AL
Administrator in Leisure, Travel & Tourism
Small-Business(50 or fewer emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
AE
Administrator in Education Management
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
AC
Administrator in Computer Software
Small-Business(50 or fewer emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Review source: Organic
Business partner of the seller or seller's competitor, not included in G2 scores.
What do you like best?
Instana agent that helped us to create an alert and event with a threshold and we integrated with slack for notifications, it helps us a lot with our organization mainly when the server is down we get an alert using this tool and we can also create website alerts. It is fast and easy to use too Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike?
Pentaho tracking is not possible on instana it will be much easier when all the services in our organisation is monitor under a single tool. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
AT
Administrator in Transportation/Trucking/Railroad
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
What do you like best?
Their support team, bar none, is the best i've worked with. They go above and beyond to not only answer your question, but use that question to further improve their product. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike?
There isn't a good mobile experience. This makes it a bit annoying to show pages from Instana to team members on phones during outages. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
AA
Administrator in Apparel & Fashion
Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
Maurício C
Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Review source: Organic
What do you like best?
It's a really awesome tool, It's easy to get it running into your infrastructure and their automatic correlation between the different "layers" (application to infrastructure) is really great. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike?
I have been using it for a few months and so far I'm really happy with it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
