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Alluvio Aternity vs IBM Instana Observability comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Alluvio Aternity
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
34th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
38
Ranking in other categories
Mobile APM (4th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (6th)
IBM Instana Observability
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
44th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Alluvio Aternity is 0.4%, down from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Instana Observability is 0.4%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Caillin Peacock - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables us to be a lot more agile and proactive in troubleshooting endpoint issues thanks to accurate UX scoring
There are many valuable features. If I had to single out one, it would be the UXI score. That's a proprietary Aternity score that tells you how good or bad the experience is for a user on that particular machine, for a particular app. It neatly encapsulates the pain of the user in a single score. It's very easy to find issues and then drill down further into those issues, based on that score. A lot of tools will do a similar thing, but they will do it indirectly and it's not always relevant. The Aternity score is on the money pretty much every time. The Digital Experience Index (DXI) feature is also very valuable. We've incorporated it into the KPIs for our endpoint team. We can use that as a benchmark to improve our goals and our environment, and for ongoing life cycle improvement.
Tomas Kim - PeerSpot reviewer
Not expensive and offers good performance
The most valuable feature of the solution is performance. A one-vendor solution serves as a good feature of the tool. In the IT industry, the IT support team has lots of vendors to contact. DB monitoring is done by one company, while WaaS monitoring is done by another and done by another company, which makes it really complicated for the IT team concerned about the security levels. The tool's main feature is that it is a one-vendor solution. The analysis done by the tool is a good feature. The tool is used as an open-source tool. The tool is growing, and new features are being added to the product.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Alluvio Aternity provides predictive analysis and trend analysis for IT teams to evaluate the performance of hardware and applications."
"The dashboards of this platform are the most valuable, especially the Desktop Health dashboard."
"The ability to quickly utilize the dashboard to gather information is valuable from a DXI perspective."
"As a financial institution, we have a lot of applications that are either written internally or bought from a vendor and customized for us. Having a tool that lets us monitor specific transactions in those applications allows us to focus on the transactions that are important to the business."
"There are also built-in activities that let you measure things like preview mail, open address book, and send mail. Those are the activities that we are able to get measurements on, and those are things we have not seen in other software monitoring tools."
"We've looked at the Digital Experience Management Quadrant (DEM-Q) to see how our digital experience compares to others who use the solution. We have used that to see how we are trending and it gives us some insight into areas that we might need to focus more on. That's helpful."
"Aternity provides metrics about actual employee experience of all business-critical apps, rather than just a few. It does some out-of-the-box monitoring for the Office suite, but you can create custom monitoring for any of your applications, whether a web client or a desktop application."
"The two most valuable features for us are its abilities to validate the customer experience and to measure performance before and after upgrades."
"The most valuable features of IBM Instana are its quick data collection and analytics after installing the agent."
"The solution has a one-second resolution, giving you the status of your application within one second."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is performance."
 

Cons

"Aternity doesn't currently provide metrics about actual employee experience of all business-critical apps. It's something you have to build out. It's not 'canned' that way and there is a lot of configuration that you have to do to the environment to collect the data you want to collect and that is important to you."
"I think the workflow needs improvement"
"I would like to get more granular detail. In regards to defining the applications and activities upfront, that can be challenging. Simplifying that would be a big win. One of the things that I know they are already working on is a verbose mode."
"The thing that I think most companies like ourselves would want would be an easier way to customize custom scripts."
"The only thing I can say which has been frustrating are the Tableau workspace/dashboard options out-of-the-box, at least prior to version 8."
"For me, the biggest problem is the price. It is not so much about how much it costs. It is about Aternity only giving you 12 months upfront. So, you got to purchase it for 12 months. A lot of our customers are on a per-user-per-month type billing. They are all OPEX rather than CAPEX. It would be a lot better for our customers if there was an option available for OPEX so that it is billed on a monthly basis than a yearly basis. They've got only Windows agents. They don't actually have mobile agents. It would be a lot better if they could also integrate Android and iOS because then we can start pulling steps and performance management out of users' mobile devices. That's the biggest addition I would suggest at the moment. A lot of our customers have desktops as well as tablets or mobile devices. We should be able to monitor that stuff as well."
"Right now, the user information being displayed by Aternity is received from AD. Ideally, we would like to see integration with other sources for user information, like other databases, so we are not limited to AD."
"I would like to see more granular performance counters collected and viewable from the endpoints. That would be great."
"One area that requires improvement is related to the automation part, specifically automated actions like sending SMS."
"The solution should include log management and improve reporting and integration with Cognos."
"The product's initial setup phase is not very easy."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's price is pretty comparable to the industry."
"It is definitely a premium solution; it is not an inexpensive product. We have to ensure that we are getting the most out of it in order to justify the cost. However, it is not cheap, especially when you want to install it on all your endpoints."
"Our management squeezed Aternity pretty hard on the pricing, in my opinion a little too much. I advise negotiating for sure, but I do think it left kind of a sour taste in Aternity’s mouth that we were being so pushy despite the fact that we were only purchasing a small number of licenses."
"The price for Alluvio Aternity is favorable."
"The pricing is reasonable for the value that it gives because it does allow you to measure the cost ramifications of direct productivity loss for spends in both your infrastructure and on endpoints."
"It's not a cheap product. There are no two ways about that. If you compare it with a couple of the other solutions operating in the space, it might be on the slightly more expensive side, but it is one of those tools where, once you've got it, you understand the true value. You will get that money back."
"Its licensing cost is very low. That's one of the reasons why we have kept it for so long. We get more than a 70% discount on the maintenance licenses. Its cost is very low for us, but if you buy it new, it would be much more expensive at the retail price."
"If the scale of your monitoring will be to go everywhere in an organization, a site license is key."
"The tool's cost is normal as per the market. The tool is not expensive."
"The solution's pricing is reasonable compared to that of its competitors like Dynatrace."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

APM tools for a Managed Service Provider - Dynatrace vs. AppDynamics vs. Aternity vs. Ruxit
Hi Avi! It's great to see your thorough approach to selecting an APM package for your MSP company. Considering your focus on SMBs and enterprises in Israel, Dynatrace seems like a solid choice with...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Aternity?
The solution's price is pretty comparable to the industry.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Instana Observability?
The tool's cost is normal as per the market. The tool is not expensive.
What needs improvement with IBM Instana Observability?
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 t...
What is your primary use case for IBM Instana Observability?
Before IBM, I ordered our company's engineer to have a look at the tool and test it. I think it was two years ago, the transfer to IBM happened in our company. At the beginning, IBM Instana Observa...
 

Also Known As

Aternity, Workforce APM, Aternity Frontline, Riverbed SteelCenter Aternity
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Maersk, SwissRe, Travis Perkins, Michelin, National Instruments, Simmons & Simmons, Lighthouse Guild
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Alluvio Aternity vs. IBM Instana Observability and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,396 professionals have used our research since 2012.