IBM Instana Observability vs LogicMonitor comparison

IBM Instana Observability

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM Instana Observability and LogicMonitor based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Instana Observability vs. LogicMonitor Report (Updated: June 2025).

IBM Instana Observability vs. LogicMonitor

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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

IBM Instana Observability

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

42nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

LogicMonitor

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

28th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (22nd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (23rd), Container Monitoring (7th), Cloud Monitoring Software (17th), AIOps (12th)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of IBM Instana Observability is 0.5%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of LogicMonitor is 0.7%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Tomas Kim

Managing Director at BA Solutions

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.

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Manish Bansod

Assistant Manager at a construction company with 5,001-10,000 employees

A feature-packed solution with excellent stability and a notification system

LogicMonitor has good features, but the ease of use is a little bit confusing. Additionally, we are looking for workflow automation, which is a little bit tricky for LogicMonitor. But we are still exploring more and do not have detailed training in LogicMonitor. Moreover, the deployment process needs improvement. The thing is the deployment or whatever the standard deployment should be implemented here. That is not fine-tuning. In my personal opinion, for workflow automation and other stuff, we have Python or scripting knowledge, and that part is very tricky. Whenever we try to call the service or the LogicMonitor team, and we open a ticket, it is chargeable. In future releases, we would like to see a configuration backup manager. A feature that automatically backups the device configuration will help us. So, instead of going with another third-party tool, this will be good.

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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 feature of the solution is performance."

"The most valuable features of IBM Instana are its quick data collection and analytics after installing the agent."

"The solution has a one-second resolution, giving you the status of your application within one second."

"We get full visibility into whatever the customer wants us to monitor and we get it pretty rapidly. That is very important. Only having certain metrics that other platforms will give you out-of-the-box means you only get a small picture, a thumbnail picture. Whereas with LogicMonitor, you get the entire "eight by 10 picture", out-of-the-box. Rather than some availability metrics, you get everything. You get metrics on temperature, anything related to hardware failure, or up and down status."

"The most valuable feature is the visualization of the data that it is collecting. I have used many products in the past and they tend to roll up the data. So, if you're looking at data over long periods of time, they start averaging the data, which can skew the figures that you're looking at. With LogicMonitor, they have the raw data there for two years, if you are an enterprise customer. If you are looking at that long duration of data, you're seeing exactly what happened during that time."

"The breadth of its ability to monitor all our environments, putting it in one place, has been helpful. This way, we don't have to manage multiple tools and try to juggle multiple balls to keep our environment monitored. It presents a clear picture to us of what is going on."

"The concept of developing a dashboard template for ourselves, then cloning it for every single customer, and only having to change one piece of information, is a godsend. That's one of the strengths. We can develop a template that fits every customer and just change the information that is presented."

"It has improved our organization with its capacity planning. We have a performance environment that we use to benchmark our applications. We use it to say, "Okay, at a certain level of concurrency, we know where our application will fall over." Therefore, we are using LogicMonitor dashboards to tell us that we're good. Our platform can handle X number of clients concurrently hitting us at a time."

"It is easy to set up and monitor an entire facility. This is crucial because we have around 80 facilities that require monitoring. LifePoint is a hub-and-spoke environment, so it is essential to understand all of the WAN interfaces."

"LogicMonitor saves time in terms of its ability to proxy a connection through a device. For example, if you are troubleshooting a device, which you may want to connect to, you can proxy this connection through the platform. As a support resource, I don't need to use multiple platforms to connect to a device to further investigate the issue. It is all consolidated. From that perspective, it saves time because a resource now only needs to use one platform."

"Another feature from the technical aspect, the back-end, is the ability to allow individual users or customers to have their own APIs. They're able to make changes using the plugins covered by LogicMonitor. That is a very powerful feature that is more attractive to our techno-savvy customers."

More LogicMonitor pros

Cons

"One area that requires improvement is related to the automation part, specifically automated actions like sending SMS."

"The product's initial setup phase is not very easy."

"The solution should include log management and improve reporting and integration with Cognos."

"There are some very specific things that need improvement in LogicMonitor. One is the lack of formatting for customized alerts, particularly the delivery of them to our email channel. We'd also like to see further customization of dashboards. Finally, something that is specific to us as an MSP that uses LogicMonitor, is white-labeling or skinning of the product, so we can make it look more customer-focused for our customers."

"The only functional area I can think of that has room for improvement would be the dashboards. They could use a refresh. It would be nice if there were more widgets and more types of widgets."

"We are working with LogicMonitor to get flexibility to see the absolute running numbers, rather than doing an average. They can keep the average for customers who want it, but there should be a way to at least show the real numbers, which are coming every second on the screen."

"LogicMonitor should always improve AI because we are always striving for real intelligence. An additional feature we'd like to see in the next release of LogicMonitor is more in the area of identification of when the dominant workload is working. There are certain devices and applications that have cycles of their own. Some are used primarily during prime time, and some are used during the overnight timeframe, and better identification and classification of those workloads would be helpful. For example, we could then do some more planning about, for this particular set of devices, as it has a prime time environment, and we don't want to see a 24-hour average, as we want to see what is the 75th or 90th percentile utilization during the prime time when it is being used, whenever that prime time is."

"One thing I would like to see is parent/child relationships and the ability to build a "suppression parent/child." For example, If I know that a top gateway is offline and I can't talk to it anymore, and anything that's connected below it or to it is also going to be offline, there is no need to alarm on those. In that situation it should create one ticket or one alarm for the parent. I know they're working towards that with their mapping technology, but it's not quite to that level where you can build out alarm logic or a correlation logic like that."

"One drawback of LogicMonitor is its licensing model, which requires an additional license for each module. For example, if you need to use Azure monitoring, you'll need an additional license on top of the base license."

"LogicMonitor has good features, but the ease of use is a little bit confusing. Additionally, we are looking for workflow automation, which is a little bit tricky for LogicMonitor."

"LogicMonitor's reporting capabilities definitely could use an improvement. We have made do with the dashboarding and done what we can to make that work for our customers. However, there are definitely customers who would like a PDF or some kind of report along those lines, where we have been utilizing other tools to provide them. The out-of-the-box LogicMonitor reporting is the only thing that we have been less than impressed with."

More LogicMonitor cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"We are on an enterprise license plan, we are paying $7.75 per device a month. That is for a commitment of 350 devices. Anything that is over the 350 is charged at 1.2 times the rate; 1.2 times $7.75 would be the overage charge. We are looking at increasing our commitment to either 450 or 500 devices. It changes our pricing if we go to 450 devices, bringing it from $7.75 down to $7.70. If we go for 500 devices, it brings it from $7.75 down to $7.50. We will probably factor in the volume discount drop from $7.75 to $7.50 in our decision of whether we uplift or not. We also have some cloud monitors, which are about $500 a month."

"It's affordable. The price we get per license is a lot cheaper than what we were getting with some of the other tools. There are other monitoring tools out there that are cheaper, but what you get with LogicMonitor, out-of-the-box, makes it worth the cost."

"We have definitely seen ROI with LogicMonitor. We used to provide 24/7 IT support for our users. We have since been able to change to operating just within normal business hours for IT support, and LogicMonitor was a large part of being able to accomplish that."

"The licensing side of things with LogicMonitor, is quite simple. It is one license per device. Recently, you have additional licenses with things, like LM Cloud, which does confuse things a bit. Because it's very hard to estimate how many licenses you're going to need until you're monitoring it, so it's quite hard through that process to give a customer price to say, "This is how much this services will cost.""

"It definitely pays for itself in the amount of time we're not spending with false errors or things that we haven't quite dealt with monitoring. It has been good cost-wise."

"We've had customers who have reduced their costs by not having multiple platforms for monitoring. That said, especially with super-large environments, the cost model for LogicMonitor is the one area where we run into issues."

"The license is annual, and I'm not fully aware of what it costs. We have a through-cycle that we go through, and they've been generous with us going above our limit. They're not strict on it. At the end of the year, they got us to renew. We always add some cushion for what we expect. Also, if you need custom monitoring or design work, you can pay them for consulting services."

"As a managed service provider, we have the highest level of licensing that they offer, so we don't have any extra fees. I believe there are some add-ons for some of the lower tiers of LogicMonitor service, but that's not something that we use with our agreement."

More LogicMonitor pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.

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860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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...

What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?

It actually depends on the exact purpose or requirements. Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better from a cloud monitoring or APM monitoring perspective. You can check...

What do you like most about LogicMonitor?

LogicMonitor helps us prevent potential downtime. It's pretty good. It generates low-level warnings that aren't necessarily preemptive but can still alert us to issues we should investigate. These ...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for LogicMonitor?

The pricing can vary yearly or monthly, depending on the clients we're working with and their size and scale. For example, the pricing for a customer with ten thousand licenses versus a hundred lic...

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Product Reports

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Download IBM Instana Observability product report

Download LogicMonitor product report

Overview

IBM Instana Observability is a versatile tool tailored for real-time monitoring and management of applications, especially in complex cloud environments. It excels in automated root cause analysis, improving system reliability, and dynamic graphing for visualizing system interconnections. With features like real-time alerting, it enhances operational efficiency and aids in prompt issue resolution, making it invaluable for maintaining robust IT operations.

IBM

LogicMonitor provides infrastructure and network monitoring, alerting, and reporting across environments like AWS, Azure, and on-premises.

LogicMonitor aids businesses and managed service providers in maintaining system health, performance, and availability. It supports various technologies including Citrix, Cisco Voice systems, operating systems, virtual machines, and network devices. Businesses benefit from dashboards and data insights for proactive management, customizable data sources, and integration with third-party applications like Slack or ServiceNow. AI technology enhances monitoring capabilities by recognizing normal behavior and updating monitored elements, while multiple monitoring features consolidate data sources into one interface.

What are LogicMonitor's key features?

Dashboards: Instant, interactive access to data for easy monitoring.
Customizable Data Sources: Robust, adaptable monitoring with logic modules.
Granular Alert Tuning: Enhances issue identification and resolution.
Reporting Capabilities: Detailed oversight and forecasting.
Third-Party Integration: Expands functionality with applications like Slack and ServiceNow.
AI Technology: Recognizes normal behavior and updates monitored elements.
Consolidated Monitoring: Combines diverse data sources into a single interface.

What benefits or ROI should users expect?

System Health: Ensures optimal system performance and availability.
Data Insights: Facilitates proactive management with comprehensive data.
Scalability: Adapts to different environments and technologies.
Efficiency: Streamlines monitoring with a single, efficient interface.
Predictive Analysis: Provides detailed oversight and accurate forecasting.

LogicMonitor is utilized across diverse industries by managed service providers to ensure seamless monitoring and management of clients' systems. This includes application performance monitoring, manual topology mapping, SLA calculations, and improvement of role-based permissions. Companies also seek enhanced resources view, better collector upgrade processes, and streamlined customization for monitoring from the repository.

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Kayak, Zendesk, Ted Baker, Trulia, Sophos, iVision, TekLinks, Siemens

IBM Instana Observability vs. LogicMonitor