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Alluvio Aternity vs IBM Instana Observability comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Alluvio Aternity
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
33rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
38
Ranking in other categories
Mobile APM (4th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (6th)
IBM Instana Observability
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
43rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Alluvio Aternity is 0.5%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Instana Observability is 0.5%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Caillin Peacock - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables us to be a lot more agile and proactive in troubleshooting endpoint issues thanks to accurate UX scoring
There are many valuable features. If I had to single out one, it would be the UXI score. That's a proprietary Aternity score that tells you how good or bad the experience is for a user on that particular machine, for a particular app. It neatly encapsulates the pain of the user in a single score. It's very easy to find issues and then drill down further into those issues, based on that score. A lot of tools will do a similar thing, but they will do it indirectly and it's not always relevant. The Aternity score is on the money pretty much every time. The Digital Experience Index (DXI) feature is also very valuable. We've incorporated it into the KPIs for our endpoint team. We can use that as a benchmark to improve our goals and our environment, and for ongoing life cycle improvement.
Tomas Kim - PeerSpot reviewer
Not expensive and offers good performance
The most valuable feature of the solution is performance. A one-vendor solution serves as a good feature of the tool. In the IT industry, the IT support team has lots of vendors to contact. DB monitoring is done by one company, while WaaS monitoring is done by another and done by another company, which makes it really complicated for the IT team concerned about the security levels. The tool's main feature is that it is a one-vendor solution. The analysis done by the tool is a good feature. The tool is used as an open-source tool. The tool is growing, and new features are being added to the product.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The two most valuable features for us are its abilities to validate the customer experience and to measure performance before and after upgrades."
"Aternity provides metrics about actual employee experience of all business-critical apps, rather than just a few. It does some out-of-the-box monitoring for the Office suite, but you can create custom monitoring for any of your applications, whether a web client or a desktop application."
"The data the solution provides is valuable to us; we can see the health of the machines, how they are performing, and what might be causing issues on a particular machine."
"The dashboard is very effective."
"The most valuable feature is the application performance troubleshooting because Aternity is able to provide the performance from the end-user perspective. It doesn't just give the standard application logon time, etc., rather it's also able to measure the performance inside the application, the performance of specific transactions in the application, and break it down into three elements: the client time, the network time, and the server time. This gives us a lot of insights into what we need to focus on to improve the performance of an application."
"The most valuable feature for us is trend analysis, particularly with device-help type of events and computer help events, such as blue screens, application errors, and application crashes."
"The most valuable thing that you get from Aternity is very broad visibility. You get visibility of your network, of your endpoints, of your software usage, your application performance, capacity, in one pane of glass. We had 20 to 30 IT tools, including application performance monitoring, network monitoring, security, endpoint detection, network protection, capacity management, service management — every kind of monitoring you can imagine. But Aternity was always the first place that I turned for anything, because you can see everything in it."
"Aternity's Digital Experience Management Quadrant (DEM-Q) has been a game changer for us. While knowing your own metrics is nice, if you don't know how you compare to others or what the numbers should be, then it doesn't tell you much. This solution puts that into context (if we are doing better than others or worse), which helps us prioritize where we want to focus and do improvements versus that's just how slow it's supposed to be. It's also great in communicating what we are doing and why we're doing it to our IT leadership teams, by saying, while we're pretty far behind others in certain categories, the time and changes for our prioritizations are justified."
"The most valuable features of IBM Instana are its quick data collection and analytics after installing the agent."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is performance."
"The solution has a one-second resolution, giving you the status of your application within one second."
 

Cons

"Potentially, the one thing that could probably help with better levels of enterprise adoption is around creating the application monitoring signatures. That process can be a little bit difficult. If one thing could be simplified a little bit, it would be the application monitoring signature creation process."
"Right now, the user information being displayed by Aternity is received from AD. Ideally, we would like to see integration with other sources for user information, like other databases, so we are not limited to AD."
"Signature development process requires deep technical expertise in the application and in the use of their studio tools that help you create it."
"We are waiting for the GA release of their agent. I hope they can do better when they release their endpoint agents. Right now, we are not able to measure some applications, core applications, because it's relying on a specific version of the agent and that agent has not come out yet and there's no ETA. I would like to see them speed up time to market when they release agents."
"Aternity doesn't currently provide metrics about actual employee experience of all business-critical apps. It's something you have to build out. It's not 'canned' that way and there is a lot of configuration that you have to do to the environment to collect the data you want to collect and that is important to you."
"The thing that I think most companies like ourselves would want would be an easier way to customize custom scripts."
"For me, the biggest problem is the price. It is not so much about how much it costs. It is about Aternity only giving you 12 months upfront. So, you got to purchase it for 12 months. A lot of our customers are on a per-user-per-month type billing. They are all OPEX rather than CAPEX. It would be a lot better for our customers if there was an option available for OPEX so that it is billed on a monthly basis than a yearly basis. They've got only Windows agents. They don't actually have mobile agents. It would be a lot better if they could also integrate Android and iOS because then we can start pulling steps and performance management out of users' mobile devices. That's the biggest addition I would suggest at the moment. A lot of our customers have desktops as well as tablets or mobile devices. We should be able to monitor that stuff as well."
"When it comes to a lot of the features that I would want, they will tell you they are in their SaaS version, which we don't use... They put all the new features on the SaaS solution and that's where you get the latest and greatest stuff... Why not have those features available for on-prem users?"
"The solution should include log management and improve reporting and integration with Cognos."
"The product's initial setup phase is not very easy."
"One area that requires improvement is related to the automation part, specifically automated actions like sending SMS."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its licensing cost is very low. That's one of the reasons why we have kept it for so long. We get more than a 70% discount on the maintenance licenses. Its cost is very low for us, but if you buy it new, it would be much more expensive at the retail price."
"The pricing for the users and agents is reasonable compared to other solutions and vendors."
"The pricing is fair."
"We always try to reduce costs and purchase the Alluvio Aternity Essentials license."
"Pricing is a bit high. Don't take that as the "be all, end all"."
"You have to purchase it for 12 months, which is an issue because a lot of our customers are on a per-user-per-month type billing. There are a few additional costs. A lot of customers only get the essential licenses, and then they get what they call the application add-ons on top. They have to pay depending on how many customers and applications they want to monitor."
"If the scale of your monitoring will be to go everywhere in an organization, a site license is key."
"The price for Alluvio Aternity is favorable."
"The solution's pricing is reasonable compared to that of its competitors like Dynatrace."
"The tool's cost is normal as per the market. The tool is not expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Government
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

APM tools for a Managed Service Provider - Dynatrace vs. AppDynamics vs. Aternity vs. Ruxit
Hi Avi! It's great to see your thorough approach to selecting an APM package for your MSP company. Considering your focus on SMBs and enterprises in Israel, Dynatrace seems like a solid choice with...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Aternity?
The solution's price is pretty comparable to the industry.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Instana Observability?
The tool's cost is normal as per the market. The tool is not expensive.
What needs improvement with IBM Instana Observability?
The tool should offer more LDR AI models. The monitoring is just a status, but the next level of a monitoring solution is to prevent an accident or stop an accident status. The solution should be t...
What is your primary use case for IBM Instana Observability?
Before IBM, I ordered our company's engineer to have a look at the tool and test it. I think it was two years ago, the transfer to IBM happened in our company. At the beginning, IBM Instana Observa...
 

Also Known As

Aternity, Workforce APM, Aternity Frontline, Riverbed SteelCenter Aternity
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Maersk, SwissRe, Travis Perkins, Michelin, National Instruments, Simmons & Simmons, Lighthouse Guild
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Alluvio Aternity vs. IBM Instana Observability and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
858,038 professionals have used our research since 2012.