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Elastic Observability vs Instana Infrastructure Monitoring comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

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

Elastic Observability
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
10th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (7th), Log Management (14th), Container Monitoring (4th)
Instana Infrastructure Moni...
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
37th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
24th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Elastic Observability is 2.9%, down from 4.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Instana Infrastructure Monitoring is 0.5%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Observability2.9%
Instana Infrastructure Monitoring0.5%
Other96.6%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Adelina Craciun - PeerSpot reviewer
Customization enables tailored monitoring and alerting across departments
The possibility to customize it has been quite useful. Whatever the other departments want to dream up, we implement. Whatever they want to monitor, the granularity of it, the changes in the threshold, and the anomalies that they want reported all require some development. So far, every single request has been fulfilled.
Hakimuddin Ronaque - PeerSpot reviewer
Has the capability to automatically integrate with a large number of products
Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten. I have not worked much on other technologies, like SAP or VMware's virtualization part, on-prem infrastructure, or cloud infrastructure. Instana Infrastructure Monitoring is so fast and easy to adapt that it works fine. I have not explored other operating systems or infrastructure solutions because my company doesn't have that customer scale. Most of our customers are on-prem or on AWS or Azure, but Instana Infrastructure Monitoring adapts to their infrastructure very well. My company came to know how well Instana Infrastructure Monitoring adapts to our customers' infrastructures when we take care of the PoC phase. Around 12 to 15 people in my company use 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 product has connectors to many services."
"The tool's most valuable feature is centralized logging. Elastic Common Search helps us to search for the logs across the organization."
"Elastic Observability significantly improves incident response time by providing quick access to logs and data across various sources. For instance, searching for specific keywords in logs spanning over a month from multiple data sources can be completed within seconds."
"I have built a mini business intelligence system based on Elastic Observability."
"It is a powerful tool that allows users to collect and transform logs as needed, enabling flexible visualization and analysis."
"I found Elk to be excellent for log analytics, security analytics, application code-level analytics, collaboration with DevOps teams, CI/CD, microservices, and Kubernetes, specifically cloud-native or cloud-specific tasks."
"All the features that we use, such as monitoring, dashboarding, reporting, the possibility of alerting, and the way we index the data, are important."
"The ability to ensure that the data is searchable and maintainable is highly valuable for our purposes."
"The product's initial setup is easy."
"The product is easy to deploy."
 

Cons

"I am familiar with Azure Monitor, which I find more user-friendly compared to Elastic, which is a very technical tool."
"When opening tickets, we cannot use our team mailbox."
"Improving code insight related to infrastructure and network, particularly focusing on aspects such as firewalls, switches, routers, and testing would be beneficial."
"Simplifying the parsing of logs and manual efforts would also be beneficial."
"More web features could be added to the product."
"The only challenging aspect for new users is often writing the query language."
"It lacked some capabilities when handling on-prem devices, like network observability, package flow analysis, and device performance data on the infrastructure side."
"The tool's scalability involves a more complex implementation process. It requires careful calculations to determine the number of nodes needed, the specifications of each node, and the configuration of hot, warm, and cold zones for data storage. Additionally, managing log retention policies adds further complexity. The solution's pricing also needs to be cheaper."
"The product’s scalability is an area with certain limitations, making it an area where improvements are required."
"Instana Infrastructure Monitoring needs to support monitoring of the .NET framework since it is one of the areas where the solution currently has shortcomings."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Elastic Observability is expensive."
"Elastic Observability is cheaper than other similar solutions, such as Dynatrace. Its license calculation is based on various factors like data volume and physical infrastructure, particularly related to RAM capacity."
"So far, there are just the standard licensing fees. Several of the components are embedded in the license or are even open source. They're even free depending on what you use, which makes it even more appealing to someone that is discussing pricing of the solution."
"There are two types: cloud and SaaS. They charge based on data ingestion, ingest rate, hard retention, and warm retention. I believe it costs around $25,000 annually to ingest 30GB of data daily. That is the SaaS version. There is also a self-managed license where the customer manages their own infrastructure on-prem. In such cases, there are three license tiers that respectively cost $5,000 annually per node, $7,000 per node, and $12,500 per node."
"We will buy a premium license after POC."
"Pricing is one of those situations where the more you use it, the more you pay."
"We have been using the open-source version."
"Since we are a huge company, Elastic Observability is an affordable solution for us."
"The cost of the tool is around 130 USD per month."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Elastic Observability?
Elastic Observability significantly improves incident response time by providing quick access to logs and data across various sources. For instance, searching for specific keywords in logs spanning...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Observability?
The problem is their licensing model, which is a bit confusing. Many customers struggle to understand their total cost of ownership because Elastic licensing is not dependent on easy, quantifiable ...
What needs improvement with Elastic Observability?
Out-of-the-box use cases have room for improvement in Elastic Observability. They don't invest a lot in building out-of-the-box observable use cases, and they are more focusing on giving a very fle...
What needs improvement with Instana Infrastructure Monitoring?
The product’s scalability is an area with certain limitations, making it an area where improvements are required.
What is your primary use case for Instana Infrastructure Monitoring?
I use the solution in my company, especially if an application is down and it is considered to be a P1 issue or a critical issue. The network team will blame the application team, while the applica...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

PSCU, Entel, VITAS, Mimecast, Barrett Steel, Butterfield Bank
booxware, drivenow, scopevisio, enevo, TimoCom, mobitech
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Observability vs. Instana Infrastructure Monitoring and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,706 professionals have used our research since 2012.