

Azure Monitor and IBM Instana Observability compete in the observability and monitoring sector. Azure Monitor appears to have the upper hand in pricing and integration, while IBM Instana's feature set and analytics provide a significant edge.
Features: Azure Monitor is known for its diagnostics and smooth integration with Azure services. It offers customizable dashboards, comprehensive log analytics, and effective diagnostics. IBM Instana Observability provides automatic discovery of application components, real-time updates, and powerful trace analytics. Instana excels in automation and real-time monitoring, suitable for complex, dynamic environments.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Azure Monitor has seamless integration within Azure environments, favoring those familiar with Microsoft services. IBM Instana offers simple deployment across diverse environments with extensive support throughout the process.
Pricing and ROI: Azure Monitor is cost-efficient, especially for those already in the Microsoft ecosystem, offering good ROI through bundled services. IBM Instana's higher setup costs are justified by its advanced features, which optimize resource usage and boost operational efficiency, providing substantial ROI.
Azure Monitor helps prevent impacts on their system.
It provides a single pane of glass from which I can see what is happening with all the servers in my infrastructure, which saves time.
It made a notable difference from when we were almost blind to being able to respond to calls immediately.
If we have a monitoring tool, we can save our transactions and see the performance of the application using MTTR and MTTD.
However, the second-line support is good.
Users end up getting no resolution from their team because they're outsourced vendors, and they don't have deeper expertise over any of the products they are referring to.
I would rate the support for Azure Monitor as a seven.
They are very slow to respond and integrate new features.
IBM support for Instana is responsive and helpful.
My experience with IBM Instana Observability's customer support has been very helpful and responsive.
With APM, you can go heavy or you can go light. It just depends on what you want, what your use case is, and how reactive you want to be to system load or resilient to failure.
Azure Monitor is very scalable; there are no issues with scalability for different kinds of businesses.
More innovations are coming in every day, so it is scalable and more applications are becoming container-based.
IBM Instana Observability demonstrates scalability, especially in dynamic, distributed environments such as microservices and Kubernetes.
Azure Monitor is working fine, yet I face a costing issue as if there are a lot of logs collected in the workspace or in the center, it becomes very costly.
If Azure Monitor can independently add one gigabyte, two gigabytes, or five gigabytes at least to log storage, I can fix the logs without syncing with Log Analytics Workspace and Sentinel.
The cost skyrockets once you start using it, and there are complaints that the actual cost of the Kubernetes cluster was less than the cost they were incurring for Azure Monitor.
The challenges with Azure Monitor are that it's initially complex to set up because you need multiple components.
I had many false positives with IBM Instana Observability. Then I fixed the filters and it became more accurate on the errors reported.
One main issue I found with IBM Instana Observability was the customer support, which was very poor when we needed some features to be enabled or integrated into IBM Instana Observability sensors.
It is not open-source, and I have to be a partner to get more access to the products.
When I export logs into the application, workspace, log analytic workspace, and into Sentinel to read reports, I need to add storage, which increases the cost.
I find the cost of IBM Instana Observability to be very affordable compared to competitors because the pricing mechanism is based on the host that we monitor, unlike other competitors such as DataDog and Dynatrace, whose pricing is based on other factors.
It is not that costly, especially since we only use two instances.
I think the pricing is good and I do not think it is high.
The alerting features definitely help in reducing operational downtime for my customers by allowing us to get notifications in advance and take active actions.
I also appreciate the ability to measure feature activity, see what types of devices they are on, follow specific use cases, and measure the amount of traffic going to a particular application.
Resource monitoring is essential.
IBM Instana Observability has positively impacted my organization by making it easy to observe the entire infrastructure under one platform, which was the biggest advantage of onboarding onto IBM Instana Observability.
IBM Instana Observability has impacted my organization positively in that it has helped me find out what the issue is in real-time because of its one-second granularity and its ability to identify issues as quickly as possible.
IBM Instana Observability has positively impacted our organization by decreasing our 500 errors.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Azure Monitor | 3.7% |
| IBM Instana Observability | 0.8% |
| Other | 95.5% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 23 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 7 |
| Large Enterprise | 29 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 4 |
| Large Enterprise | 5 |
Azure Monitor is a comprehensive monitoring solution offered by Microsoft Azure. It provides a centralized platform for monitoring the performance and health of various Azure resources, applications, and infrastructure.
With Azure Monitor, users can gain insights into the availability, performance, and usage of their applications and infrastructure. The key features of Azure Monitor include metrics, logs, alerts, and dashboards. Metrics allow users to collect and analyze performance data from various Azure resources, such as virtual machines, databases, and storage accounts.
Logs enable users to collect and analyze log data from different sources, including Azure resources, applications, and operating systems. Azure Monitor also provides a robust alerting mechanism that allows users to set up alerts based on specific conditions or thresholds. These alerts can be configured to notify users via email, SMS, or other notification channels. Additionally, Azure Monitor offers customizable dashboards that allow users to visualize and analyze their monitoring data in a personalized and intuitive manner.
Azure Monitor integrates seamlessly with other Azure services, such as Azure Automation and Azure Logic Apps, enabling users to automate actions based on monitoring data. It also supports integration with third-party monitoring tools and services, providing flexibility and extensibility.
Overall, Azure Monitor is a powerful and versatile monitoring solution that helps users gain deep insights into the performance and health of their Azure resources and applications. It offers a wide range of features and integrations, making it a comprehensive solution for monitoring and managing Azure environments.
IBM Instana Observability offers real-time application monitoring and management, designed for automation and intelligence on modern cloud-based environments.
IBM Instana Observability provides deep visibility into application performance, empowering businesses with automated root cause analysis and intelligent alerts to optimize cloud-native applications. It captures and visualizes comprehensive health metrics to enhance operational efficiency across distributed systems, making it an invaluable tool for IT and DevOps teams seeking to improve application reliability and performance.
What are the key features of IBM Instana Observability?IBM Instana Observability is widely adopted across industries like finance, healthcare, and retail, addressing specific challenges in each sector. In finance, it helps manage high-volume transactions with minimal latency. Healthcare benefits from its compliance support and reliable data monitoring. Retail industries utilize it for maintaining seamless customer interactions and operational uptime, ensuring business continuity and customer satisfaction.
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