Technical Manager at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
Reseller
Top 5
Jan 5, 2026
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.
Technical Lead at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Top 10
Jan 5, 2026
IBM Instana Observability can be improved because the current software is quite large with many components in a single software package. If you need to install the IBM Instana Observability core backend, it uses a large scale. An improvement would be to reduce the capacity required for installation. The pricing for IBM Instana Observability is something I would address in terms of needed improvements because it is expensive. I understand it is easy and good to use, but I think it is expensive for a small to medium-sized enterprise to use.
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. They used to take a long time to respond and implement the features we requested, and customer support was not really great. They were slow to integrate new features, whereas competitors were providing better features at a faster pace. IBM Instana Observability is not really stable; I would say it is stable approximately 95 percent of the time.
The interface of IBM Instana Observability is really slow, especially when there is a lot of data and when there are a lot of traces. The interface almost hangs up. The alerting integrations in IBM Instana Observability are mostly reliable, though it depends on the filter I put. The problem is that the filter is somewhat complex to integrate. I had many false positives with IBM Instana Observability. Then I fixed the filters and it became more accurate on the errors reported. Also, errors gradually decreased from around 10 to 500 errors per 100 calls to one or two.
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 to prevent accidents. Previously, monitoring might have been scanning and alerting and then sending information to the IT manager. The lack of support is a human resource problem.
IBM Instana Observability offers real-time metrics, one-second resolution, and integrates alerts with Slack and email, enhancing IT and application monitoring. It aids teams in identifying system issues quickly and effectively, streamlining IT management. IBM Instana Observability provides a single-vendor solution for seamless observability in distributed environments, integrating one-second resolution metrics, robust application monitoring, and detailed observability maps. Its comprehensive...
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.
IBM Instana Observability can be improved because the current software is quite large with many components in a single software package. If you need to install the IBM Instana Observability core backend, it uses a large scale. An improvement would be to reduce the capacity required for installation. The pricing for IBM Instana Observability is something I would address in terms of needed improvements because it is expensive. I understand it is easy and good to use, but I think it is expensive for a small to medium-sized enterprise to use.
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. They used to take a long time to respond and implement the features we requested, and customer support was not really great. They were slow to integrate new features, whereas competitors were providing better features at a faster pace. IBM Instana Observability is not really stable; I would say it is stable approximately 95 percent of the time.
The interface of IBM Instana Observability is really slow, especially when there is a lot of data and when there are a lot of traces. The interface almost hangs up. The alerting integrations in IBM Instana Observability are mostly reliable, though it depends on the filter I put. The problem is that the filter is somewhat complex to integrate. I had many false positives with IBM Instana Observability. Then I fixed the filters and it became more accurate on the errors reported. Also, errors gradually decreased from around 10 to 500 errors per 100 calls to one or two.
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 to prevent accidents. Previously, monitoring might have been scanning and alerting and then sending information to the IT manager. The lack of support is a human resource problem.
The solution should include log management and improve reporting and integration with Cognos.