Instana Reviews

The GUI mode is highly user friendly with emphasis on various sectors, servers, services, endpoints, process etc almost everything & anything you can think of. You can hover over things or you can manually search & query things you need & the server pulls you out the data at a snap of your fingers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The API server gave us some tough time to configure few of our alerts forwarding to slack but thanks to the awesome support from the Instana support guys..they fixed it in their immediate next release. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

If you want you infrastructure to run without worrying to look back, this is it... Instana !!

We almost monitor all of our prod & dev servers, jvm services running inside it and anything we want to configure. The alert & SNS service is just simply awesome while it comes to work with almost negligent latency. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

- Automatic technologies detection and monitoring (constantly)

- Support all components cross the technology stack (client side, server side, containers, DB,...)

- Provide an holistic view cross the technology stack

- Very good transaction analysis, sub millisecond tracing.

- Easy to use also for business related departments.

- Combine both APM and logging in transaction granularity

- Innovative AI driven proactive monitoring and notification

- 0 TCO and maintenance

- Great ROI

- Stable

- Instant support 24/7

- Logs query could be improved

- Support complex query for transactional data and logs

After experimenting several APM solutions, I concluded Instana to be the best APM currently in the market.

In less than 20 sec Instana will automatically detect your technologies and will enable you the most intuitive and innovative dashboard to monitor and control.

It is one of the few tools that enables you to control your APM, transactions and *logs* in one holistic view.

Plays well with all the advanced technologies (either client side , server side or containers).

Became a must use tool for our daily work activity.

- Transaction monitoring for reactive code.

- Complete transactional tracing (Not statistical) with APM and logging details

- Business colleges are able to easily monitor accounts performance with customized views

- Outstanding and innovative UX enable to analyze technical issues in a way no other APM provide.

- Zero (0) maintenance for the APM, enable the development and devOps team to focus on our product.

Almost no instrumentation needed - just add the agent to your host and the sensor to your code, and it will collect all necessary data.

Pricing - Instana has a very sensible pricing policy which makes it actually a great value for your money.

Performance - the SaaS performs flawlessly.

Perfect for microservices - automatically aggregates relevant metrics across multiple hosts and services based on a configuration

auto discovery - discovers and monitors public cloud services you use for Azure and AWS

The incident heuristic needs some improvements - some issues declared as incidents such as drop of requests are just regular events happening in our system. There should be a way for the system to learn or a facility to configure this.

Incident Detection

Alerting on Incidents

Measure availability of overall service / determine our SLA

Understand how our microservice architecture performs as a whole

As UI developer, knowing console error for various client browser is the most helpful feature. Also it shows requests from various geographical location which is very helpful during analysis and sometimes serves as a pointer to a bug you are looking into.

It's been just couple of months since I started using, so for me getting request parameters for each client request is something also very useful, which I found missing (or may be I did not dig in that much)

Very easy to use and offers very powerful and useful features. Integration with various modules are also very easy and documentation is also very helpful and up to point.

The need to ask client for console error are completely eliminated with instana.

Integrations (opsgenie, aws, grafana)

The dashboard has a very fresh look

SDK for most programming language to implement instrumentation.

out-of-the-box instrumentation for popular frameworks.

filtering by kubernetes resources is not fully implemented.

filtering by most used aws resources, not yet available.

filtering in the infrastructure view is somewhat annoying and inconsistent between resources

aggregating (any) resources in the infra view is not straight forward.

the infrastructure view seems to play second base in the new release against the application view.

alerting stops working sometimes (dashboard and hooks).

alerting didn't respect the hooks we've set up and were showing false alarms. or alarms from other applications that had nothing to do with our alerting rules.

i've completely gave up on alerting at some point and turned it off, since all it was doing was sending false slack messages.

it looks and feels like a work in progress.

I think that the product would be better in about a year or two, a lot more maturity is needed for the enterprise.

at first it looks amazing, but in practice it lacks. mostly it's not features that it lacks, but actual stability of the platform. updates usually break the product. worst off they break alarm rules, so if you count on that to ensure operation stability and have a fast response to issues you'll have surprises.

monitoring of core infrastructure on prem, cloud and applications deployed in kubernetes.

- Instana was easy to implement

- has great metrics and insight

- supports clients and servers

- works very stable

- great support

- good organized online seminars

- identifying performance problems easily

- complexity, even it is also a contra for beginners

- flexibility

- provides a great range of graphs and metrics

- Stan is great

- instana running on a client costs some performance

- sometimes things are a little bit hard to understand

- the user interface is not very intuitive in the beginning

- complexity makes it hard for beginners

- some features we need are still in development

Instana is a good product with great features and great flexibility and with a little more features there is still room for improvement. Especially in the Graphic User Interface there are some improvements worthy also the usage should be more intuitive to get beginners an easier entry into it. In our company, we benefited greatly from Instana and were able to analyze some things and improve our product. Also Stan, the Logo of Instana is very cool.

We are using Instana as a tool of monitoring of our platform. We are monitoring and measuering servers and clients. It is an excellent tool to get the full overview of your plattform. We also using it to monitor and identifiying the issues in our applications. In our company, we benefited greatly from Instana and were able to analyze some things and improve our product

As a support manager, trying to understand our platform performance a key for success. Understanding flow, usage, and performance for each user is critical when troubleshooting. With minimal details, we can trace and narrow down issues for our users very easily and quickly.

While we got used to the classic view and created our workflows, the new interface took some time to retrain our staff and had to go through retaining for the team members. But with some short training and helpful staff at Instana, we were able to get back to full speed

With a cloud based platform, we have many areas to review for any issues our users encountered. End users, cloud, our own applications and tools. Looking at each individual component doesn't always help us understand the issue. With Instana, it gives us the whole picture view, from usage and flow and how each input from end user to cloud to query and how much time each piece is consuming is a great help for our trouble shooting.

1. The auto discovery of the services/JVMs etc.

2. Install the agent & forget everything. Things are being discovered automatically.

3. The awesome UI/dashboard having all the required details handy.

The APIs are still not so much matured. However it has rich coverage of APIs.

1. The auto discovery of the services/JVMs etc.

2. Install the agent & forget everything. Things are being discovered automatically.

3. The awesome UI/dashboard having all the required details handy.

Application performance comparison before & after a new release. The host specific metrics helped the team to catch & rectify the H/W issues much before the scenarios goes out of control.

It is able to automate the discovery of infrastructure – servers (added or removed), containers, microservices, etc. UI logs are useful and helps to improve the performance. Instana has solved size of environment, rate of change, rate of deployment,etc.. This was no easy task and it required the creation of brand new technologies that are the intellectual property of Instana. Nobody will solve all of these challenges just by cobbling together a bunch of open source big data tools. This gives Instana a major architectural competitive advantage.

I think instana provides the required features for my project. So far nothing which I disliked about it

I would like to recommend to my friends and colleagues as instana is really useful.

Network logs helps us to analyze back end issues. Performance improvement and it's easier to fix errors.

- Straightforwardness of the application which has a very friendly interface for users on getting to what they want to see.

- Timeline

Infrastructure map could be more informative as a landing page upon logged in

If you are into simpler yet sufficient monitoring on a glance, this is perfect

It gives us the necessary views on the health of our the applications and also the hosts (which has been a problem especially on its storage space that flooded by logs which we had to do cleanups from time to time)

The overview of everything and the easy handling. Instana is very easy to use and can see everything on the first look. The realtime monitoring is very usefull.

Also the nice webinars.

The setup on endclients. To get it work you have to be on the client and setup it manualy. Also, you have to consider, if it's 32 or 64bit system. This could be easier, at least for endclients (desktop PCs etc.)

I'm responsible for the frontend support. We can easy realize, how often the issue occured and how long it went on.

The easy with which alerts can be configured is outstanding. The fact that the alerts can be channelized to multiple delivery channels is very useful . It is a innovative way to easily monitor the infrastructure at reasonable cost.

the limits to the number of configurable points should be increased.

Product releases should be pre-announced and should be restricted to 2-3 per year

Trying to monitor our production systems and preemptively manage reduce down time. By creating appropriate alerts (CPU, disk etc) we are to predict and prevent outrage.

Simplicity and flexibility of the solution. Excellent customer support. Application focused product with available to drill down to infrastructure details. Self learning model, with huge capabilities to support the automation of ops processes.

High consumption of client performance. High amount of changes on the SaaS platform lead to failures, but customers support is quite fast to fix them immediately. Some enterprise relevant features are still missing.

We do the whole monitoring of the Platform. Also APM is used by > 40 Developers to analyze and prevent failures.

- Ease of installation, you just have to spin up the daemon set, no code changes needed

- User interface is modern and intuitive

- No call sampling is done. So all calls (REST, gRPC etc,) can be viewed

- Distributed call tracing is awesome.

- Alerting and error reporting

None, I don't see any obvious shortcomings with Instana.

Developers use Instana to detect and fix issues with complex application call graphs. if there are any performance issues, they are very easy to detect. Unlike other APM;s that show only overall latency, memory and CPU utilization, this goes into great detail into every layer of application, starting from host, to container, to application.

I have been using it for monitoring the performance of spark jobs and using the metrics for fine tuning the infrastructure needed for spark jobs. Instana has helped me right from the installation script, yes, just a one liner. The graphs are detailed, very easy to detect and altogether i like the feel of the website as well.

The spark jobs i was running on was of 2.3.0. However after some time, i found out that this version of spark is not supported by instana. It would be great if you can add this to your future releases. However i was able to get generic details of cluster usage.

This is the right tool for monitoring your entire system

I am trying to use it for monitoring the performance of spark jobs and using the metrics for fine tuning the infrastructure needed for spark jobs.

The ease with with instana lets you monitor your application and helps you drill down to the root cause is amazing.

searching the nodes/servers to analyze could be made more user friendly

Easy to use efficient tool for application monitoring.

we are using instana to actively monitor the exact, real-time health of our application, hosts, and processes.

I love to see all instances issues like OOM and issues related to all instances at one place.Especially Instana is used to dump all the logs at one place and useful to narrow down the actual issues.I have used this application lot of time whenever there is a issues and it helped me a lot.

UX can be Improved but necessary.Except this everything is awesome. :)

Highly recommended

Project which I am working is using AWS services.We have almost 40 EC2 instances and we are using instana to analyze issues and fix on demand

Deep insight Instana gives me when troubleshooting our Kubernetes based applications.

Amazing visualization of the Infrastructure.

It's really dificult to find something I don't like.

Instana is for us a key monitoring solution for our Kubernetes clusters. It's useful not only for proactive monitoring, but also for after-fact post mortem analysis.

The User interface and the easiness to quickly use the tool make this tool a great product. The view of the dashboard gives an overall state of the servers.

Will be much better if detailed logs are captured within the tool

Quick resolutions of the infrastructure related issues

UI is really user friendly and you can identify any issue really fast

the query system sometimes is confusing

You need to provide some sort of help while querying

We can tackle prod issues really fast since we are able to identify them quickly

Instana has really made life easier. After trying super costly APM like AppDynamics and Buggy New Relic, Instana makes things easier

The UI I feel can still be improvised. Node JS monitoring can provide more details, like Database connections etc in a better way.

We use Instana to monitor our Kubernetes Cluster. The biggest benefit is we don't need to configure apps now. It just picks them up. This saves time.

I'm a developer working in microservices architecture .Instana has been handy in analyzing traces and finding root cause in less than 60 seconds in production environment,looking forward to use all features of instana.

Overall it is innovative in microserivices era.

nothing to dislike so far in instana tool

Highlevel view of instana with infrastructure

Granular level detailing with requests

Better monitoring capabilities with alerts and messages

This product is really useful to track all the instances together and analyze all prod issue at one platform.This is innovative product and amazing feature for all web applications.

Initially it will take some time to understand the functionality but its easy after using for some days.

Strongly recommended

Monitoring all EC2 instances at one platforms will helpful to all teams and resolve all issues together.

The monitoring system is the most equipped one!

It has features which is very easy for a layman also to understand.

Absolutely nothing ! The product is self sucfficient !!

Monitoring our systems on any thresholds if are hit.. we get variuos dashboards reflecting ech of it.

Drill down function to know what execution call or SQL behind it is the performance problem.

Very happy with this product overall. Maybe improve the user interface can be imporved for non application users.

Fully test it before you buy it.

Identify the performance problem easily.

It's amazing to see how much detailed information is available in Instana. You are able to drill down on servers so monitor particular metrics.

I like the infrastructure overview a lot as well

The detail makes it a bit complex when you just started to use Instana

We were able to find servers within a large stack that had maxed out CPU. Furthermore we could monitor the JVM metrics of particular pods in Kubernetes

The ability to see all my data quickly and easily.

Configuration can take a bit of time to complete but once done it is great.

Quick results in a visual format and allows for easy use.

Its intricate details. It has all the features one should have in a monitoring tool.

There is nothing as such one should not like in this.

Very nice tool, please go for it to be stress free !!

Capacity hit, any no. of errors are being traced by it. Benefits are too high as we are getting the bits without getting ibto the applictaion just by seeing the dashboard.

How robust the tools are., they are very flexible.

There is nothing that sticks out that I do not like.

None at this time.

We use this for analytics of our software.

Good for seeing all my infrastructure at once.

Filtering could be better to only see what I have searched for, not everything in a server that contains what I want

Monitoring

Error rate display, Incident reporting, integrations to slack

UI needs to be more helpful, the font size needs to be increased in some places

Production alerting

The de-facto integration with k8s makes everything so easy to set and deploy, The GUI is very intuitive.

There are still some features to be deployed, specially when talking about something other than k8s. Alerting and automation based on alarms must be improved.

Cloud and / or k8s based applications

One platform that covers most of our needs for k8s deployments

Need to improve the by adding more services on application monitoring

Monitoring systems level metrics , infrastructure metrics

Provides wide range of graphs and metrics.

Need some research to use it as large amount if detail is provided.

Instana is very good and easy to use monitoring tool having wide range of graphs and metrics.

We are trying to calculate spark jobs metrics for tuning.

I like the amazing monitoring details about your infrastructure with adroit and subtle.

It also introduces flexible analysis for micro services, traces, and calls

It is hard to say the disadvantages, i found only advantages.

Monitoring and fixing the issues of Cloud cluster and applications

It gives us a very good overview of the whole infrastructure and for what code is executed.

Nothing. Evryting looks good. It serves all our needs.

We are identifying issues on production environment.

I like the visual view of the entire system

Difficult to drill down into errors. Not always clear where to find a specific error and information on it.

Overall health of system

Ability to trace request time execution, memory allocation, network traffic

a query language that in have to use, in order to find something

web application performance issues