My main use case for IBM Instana Observability is to help with application performance monitoring. It helps me build understanding of my infrastructure use cases by showing which service belongs to which application and which services are dependent on which applications. It helps me get real-time monitoring of my infrastructure. I have used it to monitor IBM Power systems, VMware vSphere environments, and HMC. I have also used it to monitor the AWS cloud platform. It shows me a roadmap and indicates which services depend on other services.

The best features IBM Instana Observability offers include one-second granularity in that it goes down to specific services. For example, when my application is speaking to my database, it helps show me the particular services of the application and the specific services of the database that it is actually speaking to. It helps me build an observability map to show how traffic is flowing from the application down to the database and shows me each service component that is speaking to each other. Another key feature is its ability to build a live map, and it also shows real-time metrics and traces, the application response time, compute resources, and more.

The real-time metrics and observability map from IBM Instana Observability have helped me in my daily work. When I had to manually push the observability to see if I was trying to send real-time dumps to stress test my compute resource, there was a particular time I was trying to stress test it and it showed me that the particular resource was being affected as a result of the stress. IBM Instana Observability has impacted my organization positively in that it has helped me find out what the issue is in real-time because of its one-second granularity and its ability to identify issues as quickly as possible.

I have seen specific outcomes from IBM Instana Observability, such as help monitoring latency in microservices applications. It has helped me get real-time metrics around latency, IO disk utilization, network utilization, read-writes, bandwidth, and compute resources. It also provides traces for end-to-end request flow.

IBM Instana Observability can be improved by providing access to the materials. It is not open-source, and I have to be a partner to get more access to the products.

I have been using IBM Instana Observability for two years.

IBM Instana Observability is stable.

IBM Instana Observability's scalability is good in that I can still support more features and more container-based applications. When it started, it was basically more about on-premises services, but now I can use it to monitor container environments. More innovations are coming in every day, so it is scalable and more applications are becoming container-based.

The customer support I experience with IBM Instana Observability is great. IBM support for Instana is responsive and helpful.

Positive

I never used a different solution before.

I have seen a return on investment with IBM Instana Observability. Time saved is a relevant metric because it helps me identify issues quickly. Rather than having to log into every server to see what is wrong with it, once I have the agent installed in my infrastructure, I just need it on one box. From there I can draw in other servers or my virtualized environment. It provides a single pane of glass from which I can see what is happening with all the servers in my infrastructure, which saves time.

I do not have much experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing. I only worked with the product.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing IBM Instana Observability.

My advice to others looking into using IBM Instana Observability is that it gives real-time and automated visibility into the application and infrastructure. It helps detect issues faster and helps fix them quickly. I rate this product 9 out of 10.