IBM Instana Observability vs LogicMonitor comparison

IBM Instana Observability

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 10, 2025

LogicMonitor and IBM Instana Observability compete in IT infrastructure monitoring. IBM Instana is stronger in enterprise features, whereas LogicMonitor holds an edge in pricing and support.

Features: LogicMonitor provides network visualization, custom dashboards, and infrastructure insights. IBM Instana offers automation, AI analytics, and performance management solutions.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: LogicMonitor's cloud architecture simplifies deployment with responsive service. IBM Instana has on-premise and cloud options, needing more setup but backed by strong support.

Pricing and ROI: LogicMonitor features transparent pricing and lower setup costs. IBM Instana needs more initial investment but offers good ROI through advanced features and efficiency.

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

39th

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

27th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (24th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (23rd), Container Monitoring (7th), Cloud Monitoring Software (18th), AIOps (13th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of IBM Instana Observability is 0.8%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of LogicMonitor is 0.8%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
LogicMonitor	0.8%
IBM Instana Observability	0.8%
Other	98.4%

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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Maxwell Miya

IT Infrastructure Engineer at Ethical Trade SErvices Africa

Has improved service reliability and reduced downtime by providing full visibility into infrastructure

I wish the user interface would be customizable to allow users to create personal context-specific workspaces to hide irrelevant data, rather than trying to have a one-size-fits-all interface. This would go a long way, as would introducing a usage-based pricing model for data ingestion, per GB of metrics or logs alongside a device-based model similar to New Relic, which would be more attractive for cloud-native companies with dynamic infrastructure. While dynamic alerting is great, the overall alerting system can be complex to configure. If LogicMonitor looks into going beyond the topology-based correlation to include AI that can group related alerts from different parts of the stack into a single probable cause incident, that will significantly improve the system.

Read full review

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 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."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is performance."

"Having a full team at LogicMonitor for support is super helpful as they are available all the time to answer any questions you may have."

"LogicMonitor has positively impacted our organization by especially improving service reliability and user experience, and the dynamic alerting and root cause analysis have helped us fix issues before they cause a full-blown outage or degrade performance for end users."

"LogicMonitor improved on-premises infrastructure monitoring in several ways. One key feature was dynamic resource allocation, although we didn't utilize it much in our system. The main functionalities we benefited from were email alerts, network mapping, and dashboards."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The alerting would be number one in my book. The thresholds for getting alerts for different criteria are pretty well-thought-out. We don't get many false positives or negatives on the alerting side. If we do get an email alert or some similar alert, we know that it is something that has to be looked at."

"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."

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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 of the areas that I sometimes find confusing is the way that the data is presented. For example, a couple of weeks back I was looking at bandwidth utilization. That's quite a difficult thing to present, but they should try to dumb down how the data is presented and simplify what they're presenting."

"The process of upgrading some of the collectors has been a little bit confusing. I need to understand that better."

"Dashboarding capabilities could be enhanced. It is cumbersome, you must do it all at once, and then you must repeat the process every now and then."

"Role-based permissions could be better and updating modules could be smoother."

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."

"The solution is not expensive."

"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."

"The tool's pricing falls into the middle range."

"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'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."

"They are expensive for the cloud."

"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."

"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."

More LogicMonitor pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	9
Large Enterprise	8

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 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?

Automatic Discovery: Identifies application components and dependencies without manual configuration.
Real-Time Monitoring: Delivers live data for instant visibility across application metrics.
AI-Powered Root Cause Analysis: Quickly pinpoints issues to reduce downtime and enhance user experience.
Intelligent Alerts: Provides actionable insights, minimizing false alarms.
Seamless Integration: Easily integrates with popular DevOps tools.

What benefits should users look for when evaluating IBM Instana Observability?

Increased Productivity: Reduces manual monitoring efforts, enhancing team efficiency.
Enhanced Performance: Improves application responsiveness and user satisfaction.
Cost Efficiency: Optimizes resource allocation, leading to reduced operational costs.
Scalable Solutions: Adapts to growing business needs, ensuring long-term value.
Detailed Insights: Offers granularity in monitoring, aiding in swift decision-making.

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.

IBM

LogicMonitor offers flexible IT monitoring with customizable dashboards and robust alerting capabilities. It integrates seamlessly with third-party apps like ServiceNow and provides a single-pane view for diverse IT environments, aiding in proactive issue resolution and enhancing operational efficiency.

LogicMonitor stands out with its capability to monitor diverse infrastructures including Cisco Voice systems, data centers, and virtual environments. Supporting servers, storage, networking devices, and applications, it provides seamless integration with cloud services like AWS and Azure. Users leverage its scalability and flexibility, benefiting from dynamic thresholds, anomaly detection, and detailed visualization. All these features contribute to improved management of IT assets and streamlined operations. Users suggest improvements in mapping, reporting, and automation for remediation, desiring more customizations and an expansive application performance monitoring toolset.

What are LogicMonitor's key features?

Customizable Dashboards: Allows personalization of monitoring views.
Robust Alerting: Offers advanced alert configurations.
API and Plugin Support: Ensures integration with apps like ServiceNow.
Dynamic Thresholds: Facilitates proactive issue resolution.
Anomaly Detection: Aids in identifying potential issues early.

What ROI should users look for in reviews?

Operational Efficiency: Enhanced by detailed visualizations and dashboards.
Scalability: Supports growing IT environments effortlessly.
Proactive Management: Facilitated by flexible alerting and monitoring.
Flexibility: Customization in monitoring diverse environments.

LogicMonitor is widely implemented across industries, providing monitoring for infrastructure in sectors like telecommunications, cloud computing, and managed services. Managed service providers particularly value its ability to track client environments, deliver proactive alerts, and generate comprehensive reports, while its integration with cloud platforms like AWS and Azure offers users centralized management and visibility into IT assets worldwide.

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

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

IBM Instana Observability vs. LogicMonitor