Enterprise APM and observability that discovers services automatically and traces every request across them.
Pricing and hosting
Plans and prices change; check the tool's own site before you decide.
What it does
Tracing and APM checklist
9 of 10 confirmed in IBM Instana's own documentation. The same checklist is used for every tool in Tracing and APM.
- Distributed tracing Yes
- OTLP traces ingest Yes
- Service map Yes
- Auto-instrumentation Yes
- Database query analysis Yes
- Error capture Yes
- Latency and error alerts Yes
- Trace to log correlation Yes
- Sampling controls No
- Code-level detail Yes
Advertises tracing with zero sampling (every request), so no sampling to configure.
Checked against: ibm.com, ibm.com (2)
Alternatives to IBM Instana
Other tracing and apm tools. See all 22.
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Apache SkyWalking APM for distributed systems from the Apache Software Foundation: agents and service mesh probes collect traces, metrics and logs and draw service topology maps. -
AppSignal APM for Ruby, Elixir, Node.js, Python, PHP, Go and front-end JavaScript that combines performance, errors, logs, host metrics, uptime checks and cron check-ins. -
Atatus Full-stack observability SaaS with APM, real user monitoring, logs, infrastructure and synthetic monitoring, priced without per-user fees. -
Blackfire Profiler and performance monitoring for PHP and Python: on-demand profiles, continuous profiling in production, and performance assertions that can run in CI. -
DeadBro APM for Ruby on Rails apps installed as a gem: request traces, slow SQL and N+1 query detection, and error tracking, priced by requests. -
Grafana Tempo Distributed tracing backend that stores traces cheaply in object storage and accepts OpenTelemetry, Jaeger and Zipkin data. -
Honeycomb Observability built for high-cardinality event data: query traces and events by any field to work out why production behaves the way it does. -
Inspector Code-level monitoring for PHP apps (Laravel, Symfony, CodeIgniter, Drupal) that shows transactions, database queries and errors as they happen. -
Jaeger CNCF distributed tracing platform for collecting, storing and exploring request traces across microservices; version 2 is built on the OpenTelemetry Collector. -
Lumigo Troubleshooting for serverless and container apps with automatic distributed tracing that captures request and response payloads across AWS Lambda and other services. -
Odigos Uses eBPF to add OpenTelemetry tracing to applications on Kubernetes without code changes and sends the data to any backend. -
OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation (OBI) Zero-code eBPF instrumentation that produces traces and RED metrics for HTTP, gRPC, database and messaging calls from Linux processes. Started as Grafana Beyla and was donated to OpenTelemetry.