External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
My main use case for IBM Instana Observability is to gain more insights about my infrastructure, servers, traffic flow, CPU and memory utilization, and metrics.
I use IBM Instana Observability to mainly understand the flow of traffic inside my Kubernetes clusters and to check the logs of my pods.
On a daily basis, I use IBM Instana Observability mostly for the monitoring of my infrastructure stack.
One of the best features IBM Instana Observability offers is its nice and clean UI, with everything being clean and sorted out.
What stands out to me specifically about the UI of IBM Instana Observability is the way everything is organized, clean, easy to read, and easy to understand with clear navigation to each component.
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.
Once we had an incident where my Kubernetes pods were crashing frequently, and it was really easy to troubleshoot because of the easily available monitoring tool IBM Instana Observability. It was easy to navigate inside IBM Instana Observability and find the logs from the pods and debug the traffic flow.
IBM Instana Observability definitely saves a lot of time. Since it integrates many things into one dashboard, it is really easy to navigate and find the root causes of failures, making it easy to troubleshoot issues as well, and all of this saves a lot of time.
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.
I have been using IBM Instana Observability for around two years.
The scalability of IBM Instana Observability is pretty good.
The customer support of IBM Instana Observability is really awful; that is one area where I found myself disliking IBM Instana Observability, as they are very slow to respond and integrate new features.
I would rate the customer support of IBM Instana Observability five out of ten.
Positive
Previously, I was using self-managed Prometheus, but then it was an organizational decision to move to a managed service, so we went with IBM Instana Observability.
I myself did not deploy IBM Instana Observability; the seniors and the leads in my team actually did that, so they would have more insight on that.
Before choosing IBM Instana Observability, I evaluated a few others such as DataDog and Groundcover.
IBM Instana Observability is not a top-of-the-line tool and definitely has flaws, but it also has a good side as well.
I would suggest others looking into using IBM Instana Observability to fully understand it first and see if it fits their use case. If their use case is very simple and beginner level, there is no need to go with a sophisticated tool such as IBM Instana Observability; but if they have a pretty large infrastructure, they can definitely go with IBM Instana Observability.
My company has no business relationship with IBM Instana Observability other than being a customer; it is purely that.
I would definitely suggest that the customer experience of IBM Instana Observability be improved significantly, and as far as the features go, please be quick to adopt new features into the tool, since competitors are really aggressive in implementing new features and rolling them out to users.
I rate IBM Instana Observability a seven out of ten.
I use IBM Instana Observability to trace our services, especially the incidents part and events. One particular feature I appreciate is the filtering of calls so that I can view analytics, including how many calls we received, how many failed, and how many succeeded.
IBM Instana Observability sends alerts through Slack, and I check Slack for messages. When I review the messages, I find the link to a particular trace. When I view a particular trace, I can see where I had a failed connection, had an error, and so on.
The integration with alerting systems such as email and Slack is the best feature of IBM Instana Observability in my opinion. 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.
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.
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.
I have been using IBM Instana Observability since I joined Ejada, for about two years now.
IBM Instana Observability is stable.
IBM Instana Observability scales well.
I did not encounter customer support for IBM Instana Observability.
I did not previously use a different solution before IBM Instana Observability.
I have seen a return on investment with IBM Instana Observability, but we do not have really solid metrics. I can only say that we saved time, especially in the response time department. It made a notable difference from when we were almost blind to being able to respond to calls immediately.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for IBM Instana Observability was fair. It is not that costly, especially since we only use two instances.
Before choosing IBM Instana Observability, we did not evaluate other options.
My advice to others looking into using IBM Instana Observability is to set up your alerts correctly to avoid false positives. I would rate this product 7 out of 10.
