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Elastic Observability vs IBM Instana Observability comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 16, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.5
Elastic Observability enhances cost-effectiveness by reducing incidents, automating fixes, and visualizing cloud operations, saving time and resources.
Sentiment score
6.0
IBM Instana Observability boosts efficiency with quick issue identification, reduces costs, and improves response times and application performance.
Elastic Observability has saved us time as it's much easier to find relevant pieces across the system in one screen compared to our own software, and it has saved resources too since the same resources can use less time.
Technology Consultant at Hybrid software
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.
UNIX/LINUX, ENTERPRISE SERVER AND STORAGE ADMINISTRATOR at Fidelity Bank Plc
It made a notable difference from when we were almost blind to being able to respond to calls immediately.
Software engineer at EJADA
If we have a monitoring tool, we can save our transactions and see the performance of the application using MTTR and MTTD.
Technical Manager, Consulting at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.6
Elastic Observability customers appreciate their helpful support, quick responses, and valuable documentation, despite some challenges in complex issue resolution.
Sentiment score
6.4
IBM Instana support is mixed, with varied responsiveness, reliance on local teams, and average ratings between five and six.
Elastic support really struggles in complex situations to resolve issues.
Assistant Vice President at QualityKiosk Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Their excellent documentation typically helps me solve any issues I encounter.
Technology Consultant at Hybrid software
They are very slow to respond and integrate new features.
DevOps engineer at Yara International
IBM support for Instana is responsive and helpful.
UNIX/LINUX, ENTERPRISE SERVER AND STORAGE ADMINISTRATOR at Fidelity Bank Plc
We did have experiences where a significant issue arose during implementation, often involving compatibility problems with JavaScript libraries used by IBM Instana Observability.
Technical Manager at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.2
Elastic Observability is praised for scalability and ease of deployment, despite potential complexities and internal process limitations.
Sentiment score
7.5
IBM Instana Observability excels in scalability for enterprises, supporting microservices, with positive user reviews and efficient growth handling.
I rate the scalability of Elastic Observability as a ten, as we have never seen issues even with a lot of data coming in from more customers, provided we have the appropriate configuration.
Technology Consultant at Hybrid software
Elastic Observability seems to have a good scale-out capability.
Chief Cloud Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Elastic Observability is easy in deployment in general for small scale, but when you deploy it at a really large scale, the complexity comes with the customizations.
Assistant Vice President at QualityKiosk Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
More innovations are coming in every day, so it is scalable and more applications are becoming container-based.
UNIX/LINUX, ENTERPRISE SERVER AND STORAGE ADMINISTRATOR at Fidelity Bank Plc
IBM Instana Observability demonstrates scalability, especially in dynamic, distributed environments such as microservices and Kubernetes.
Technical Manager, Consulting at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
Elastic Observability is stable and reliable, with high user ratings, efficiently handling large data volumes with proper configuration.
Sentiment score
8.4
IBM Instana Observability is rated high in stability, with users consistently praising its reliable and steady performance.
There are some bugs that come with each release, but they are keen always to build major versions and minor versions on time, including the CVE vulnerabilities to fix it.
Assistant Vice President at QualityKiosk Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
It is very stable, and I would rate it ten out of ten based on my interaction with it.
Product Owner at Swisscom
I would rate the stability of Elastic Observability as a ten, as we don't experience any issues.
Technology Consultant at Hybrid software
 

Room For Improvement

Elastic Observability needs automation, AI, and customization improvements, addressing complex deployment, market presence, metrics, licensing, and usability issues.
IBM Instana Observability needs enhancements in log management, AI models, user interface speed, support, and cost monitoring.
For instance, if you have many error logs and want to create a rule with a custom query, such as triggering an alert for five errors in the last hour, all you need to do is open the AI bot, type this question, and it generates an Elastic query for you to use in your alert rules.
Senior Consultant at Skillfield
It lacked some capabilities when handling on-prem devices, like network observability, package flow analysis, and device performance data on the infrastructure side.
Senior Technical Sales at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Some areas such as AI Ops still require data scientists to understand machine learning and AI, and it doesn't have a quick win with no-brainer use cases.
Assistant Vice President at QualityKiosk Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
I had many false positives with IBM Instana Observability. Then I fixed the filters and it became more accurate on the errors reported.
Software engineer at EJADA
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.
DevOps engineer at Yara International
It is not open-source, and I have to be a partner to get more access to the products.
UNIX/LINUX, ENTERPRISE SERVER AND STORAGE ADMINISTRATOR at Fidelity Bank Plc
 

Setup Cost

Elastic Observability provides competitive pricing, benefiting large enterprises with comprehensive licensing, but may be costly for smaller users.
IBM Instana offers competitive pricing in India, with a straightforward model and simple implementation despite varying cost perceptions.
The license is reasonably priced, however, the VMs where we host the solution are extremely expensive, making the overall cost in the public cloud high.
Product Owner at Swisscom
Elastic Observability is cost-efficient and provides all features in the enterprise license without asset-based licensing.
Chief Cloud Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Observability is actually cheaper compared to logs because you're not indexing huge blobs of text and trying to parse those.
Senior Consultant at Skillfield
I find the cost of IBM Instana Observability to be very affordable compared to competitors because the pricing mechanism is based on the host that we monitor, unlike other competitors such as DataDog and Dynatrace, whose pricing is based on other factors.
Technical Manager, Consulting at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It is not that costly, especially since we only use two instances.
Software engineer at EJADA
I think the pricing is good and I do not think it is high.
DevOps at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Valuable Features

Elastic Observability excels with flexible integration, powerful search, scalability, real-time insights, affordability, and robust support, enhancing efficiency.
IBM Instana Observability enhances performance with real-time insights, APM trace capabilities, and integration features to improve operational efficiency.
The most valuable feature is the integrated platform that allows customers to start from observability and expand into other areas like security, EDR solutions, etc.
Chief Cloud Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
the most valued feature of Elastic is its log analytics capabilities.
Senior Technical Sales at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
All the features that we use, such as monitoring, dashboarding, reporting, the possibility of alerting, and the way we index the data, are important.
Product Owner at Swisscom
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.
DevOps engineer at Yara International
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.
UNIX/LINUX, ENTERPRISE SERVER AND STORAGE ADMINISTRATOR at Fidelity Bank Plc
With multiple servers and multiple applications, IBM Instana Observability allows us to resolve issues very quickly because we immediately know that a disk is full, the storage is full, or the database is down.
Technical Lead at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Elastic Observability
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (9th), Log Management (14th), Container Monitoring (4th), Cloud Monitoring Software (7th)
IBM Instana Observability
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
25th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
AI Observability (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Elastic Observability is 2.6%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Instana Observability is 0.9%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Observability2.6%
IBM Instana Observability0.9%
Other96.5%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Mohammed-Abdelalim - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Vice President at QualityKiosk Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Has provided powerful customization for unique monitoring needs but needs more out-of-the-box capabilities
In my opinion, the best features of Elastic Observability are their flexibility to integrate with other existing systems and the ability to build a unified monitoring tool that can integrate with existing ones and end-to-end user journeys which require a lot of customizations. The greatest feature in Elastic is the ability to customize. This is similar to my comments about customizable dashboards in Elastic because it's visible to the analyst. However, it's very great. Customizing these dashboards can meet the customer's specific use cases and specific stories that they have in their environment, their special environment that doesn't look like other environments. The dashboarding in Elastic is highly customizable to the level of logos. If the customer wants his company logo in the dashboard, it can be done.
FranciscoGálvez - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Manager at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
Observability has improved collaboration and predicts failures across distributed services
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.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Elastic Observability?
Elastic Observability significantly improves incident response time by providing quick access to logs and data across various sources. For instance, searching for specific keywords in logs spanning...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Observability?
The problem is their licensing model, which is a bit confusing. Many customers struggle to understand their total cost of ownership because Elastic licensing is not dependent on easy, quantifiable ...
What needs improvement with Elastic Observability?
After careful consideration about areas for improvement in Elastic Observability, aspects such as pricing, customization, implementation, and scalability could be improved. As a user of the system,...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Instana Observability?
I would evaluate the implementation process of IBM Instana Observability as not complex at all because you pay the license, and IBM takes care of everything. The only problem we occasionally face, ...
What needs improvement with IBM Instana Observability?
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 planni...
What is your primary use case for IBM Instana Observability?
I usually recommend IBM Instana Observability for companies in the academic environment, as I have been working in a consultancy company for the last three years, where one of our customers built t...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

PSCU, Entel, VITAS, Mimecast, Barrett Steel, Butterfield Bank
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Observability vs. IBM Instana Observability and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.