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Catchpoint vs IBM Instana Observability comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 16, 2025

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

Catchpoint
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
38th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (62nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (31st), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (12th)
IBM Instana Observability
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
25th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
AI Observability (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Catchpoint is 0.7%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Instana Observability is 0.9%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM Instana Observability0.9%
Catchpoint0.7%
Other98.4%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

AnmolRai - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Consultant Project Lead at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
Valuable monitoring features enhance ecommerce experience while improvement needed in region-specific insights
As part of the improvement, there are certain categories, like for the China market, where we face issues. We are currently using an external tool, Splunk, for reporting. If we could receive similar data for the China market as we do for North America and Asia Pacific, this would be helpful.
FranciscoGálvez - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Manager at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
Observability has improved collaboration and predicts failures across distributed services
From my perspective, IBM Instana Observability is quite technical. Compared to some competitors, it offers an abundance of information about system performance but lacks planning or capacity planning information. You do not receive reports with recommendations; instead, it provides only the technical layer. Other companies, like Compuware, give more functional information about your environment, while IBM Instana Observability provides only limited functional insights. This means you often must interpret the data independently. Unlike other tools that can offer recommendations to save resources or costs, IBM Instana Observability does not provide that functionality. On the bright side, it is much more affordable than some other options, but it isn't complete. If you want full functionality with IBM Instana Observability, you also need to acquire other products for additional insights in monitoring areas, such as networking monitoring tools or similar products. For instance, we often recommend Turbonomic, which provides complementary insights. One potential feature that could improve IBM Instana Observability is the ability to translate KPIs into monetary terms. It would be interesting to have a product that integrates IBM Instana Observability with Turbonomic, as Turbonomic can utilize data from IBM Instana Observability to inform you about unnecessary spending and suggest whether you can consolidate servers or optimize containers for quicker response times. Implementing some level of simulation or capacity planning would greatly enhance the current capabilities of IBM Instana Observability.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features of Catchpoint are basically the transaction monitors on the API and UI."
"The product's most valuable feature is the ability to identify and troubleshoot network issues."
"We really need the API monitoring, as well as client side session monitoring, the global synthetic monitoring, to track the availability of the systems from the customer side."
"Catchpoint helped us establish that something is in a provider network, so we could tell our customers to check their internet provider because the traffic is not getting to us. You need to be gentle when you tell them that, but the fact that we could do it was crucial."
"Catchpoint is very flexible and also provides logs for troubleshooting purposes. It helps us fix issues within the SLAs signed with the end users. The tool is easy to learn."
"The best feature in Catchpoint is the alert or the notification my company gets frequently, in particular, every five minutes. It's the notification you get whenever a respective market has an issue. There's also a dashboard in Catchpoint that shows the markets you support, so all the markets will be highlighted graphically in the dashboard whenever there's downtime that could affect you. If there's no issue for a specific market, it will be in green, so in this way, anybody would be able to understand which market has issues and which market has no issues through Catchpoint. The tool is very useful for monitoring activities."
"Catchpoint provides a great amount of information."
"The solution offers three different ways of slicing data to look for abnormalities."
"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."
"If we are using IBM Instana Observability, we can save money because first, the pricing is very affordable."
"The impact of IBM Instana Observability on collaboration between development and operations teams is essential because it allows operations to identify incidents before they occur."
"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."
"IBM Instana Observability has had a very positive impact on my organization because it shortens the time required to find the root cause when we have a problem."
"IBM Instana Observability has positively impacted our organization by decreasing our 500 errors, our errors in general have decreased, our response time has decreased, and so on."
"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."
 

Cons

"As part of the improvement, there are certain categories, like for the China market, where we face issues."
"Trending needs improvement. Currently, out-of-the-box, they provide only seven days availability. So, we have to do queries and we have to go into a separate analysis module, we have to run lot of queries to long-term trends."
"A large selection of nodes are available but it is a challenge to test reliably in China and the Middle East."
"It would be great if Catchpoint could incorporate its alerting system instead of relying on separate tools like ServiceNow."
"We would like the script creation feature of this solution to be improved, as it currently requires a complicated manual process to update the scripts."
"Catchpoint can be improved by focusing solely on network monitoring."
"There are essentially a lot of quotas. Nobody wants to sit and manually create monitors for someone who uses synthetic monitoring."
"As part of the improvement, there are certain categories, like for the China market, where we face issues."
"The solution should include log management and improve reporting and integration with Cognos."
"IBM Instana Observability can be improved by simplifying the installation process, reducing the number of manual steps and dependencies, especially for hybrid, on-premise environments."
"One area that requires improvement is related to the automation part, specifically automated actions like sending SMS."
"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."
"Customer support is good; sometimes it cannot go as deep as I expected, but overall it is good."
"The pricing for IBM Instana Observability is something I would address in terms of needed improvements because it is expensive."
"The product's initial setup phase is not very easy."
"From my perspective, IBM Instana Observability is quite technical; compared to some competitors, it offers an abundance of information about system performance but lacks planning or capacity planning information."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is based on consumption and works on a point scale. For example, let's say I want to look at www.google.com, and I'm going to test it to see if it's there. It will bring back all this data that tells me how long it took to connect and how long it took to get the first byte. It will list all the resources on the page, showing that they all work and there are no broken links. It brings that data back. That test has an assigned point value depending on what you decide to extract from that test. If all I do is check to see whether it's available, it might be one point. I don't know the exact point values off-hand. This is just an example."
"The solution's pricing is comparable to the last tool we were using."
"The price and licensing are very, very high. They have to come down on the pricing to match with the industry standard."
"In terms of licensing fees, I believe they were slightly higher."
"The solution's pricing varies based on services and licensing models."
"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
23%
Retailer
12%
Real Estate/Law Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Catchpoint?
Catchpoint is very flexible and also provides logs for troubleshooting purposes. It helps us fix issues within the SLAs signed with the end users. The tool is easy to learn.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Catchpoint?
The solution's pricing varies based on services and licensing models. Clients typically see significant operational and cost efficiencies, with time savings estimated between 30% and 40%.
What needs improvement with Catchpoint?
As part of the improvement, there are certain categories, like for the China market, where we face issues. We are currently using an external tool, Splunk, for reporting. If we could receive simila...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Instana Observability?
I would evaluate the implementation process of IBM Instana Observability as not complex at all because you pay the license, and IBM takes care of everything. The only problem we occasionally face, ...
What needs improvement with IBM Instana Observability?
From my perspective, IBM Instana Observability is quite technical. Compared to some competitors, it offers an abundance of information about system performance but lacks planning or capacity planni...
What is your primary use case for IBM Instana Observability?
I usually recommend IBM Instana Observability for companies in the academic environment, as I have been working in a consultancy company for the last three years, where one of our customers built t...
 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Catchpoint vs. IBM Instana Observability and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.