At a glance
- Deployment
- saas, self-hosted
- Licence
- proprietary
- Categories
- apm, observability platform, rum synthetics, log management, instrumentation, llm observability
- Ownership
- Acquired by IBM, announced 2020-11-18 · in-concert-2026, in-ibm-intent, in-ibm-q4-2020, in-wikipedia
- Estimate
- Costed from published list prices
- Vendor-side sampling
- no
What it charges for
Every line item recorded for IBM Instana. "Not stated" means the vendor's own page gives no number; it is never treated as zero.
| Line item | Unit | Commitment | List price | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Observability Standard SaaS | host-month | annual term | $79.5 | in-policies, in-store-saas |
| Observability Essentials SaaS | host-month | annual term | $21.2 | in-policies, in-pricing, in-store-saas |
| Observability Standard PayPerUse | custom | pay-per-use, monthly in arrears | $0.12 | in-store-payg |
| Observability Essentials PayPerUse | custom | pay-per-use, monthly in arrears | $0.03 | in-pricing, in-store-payg |
| Observability Standard Self-Hosted | custom | annual, paid upfront | $1,440 | in-store-selfhosted |
| Observability Essentials Self-Hosted | custom | annual, paid upfront | $385.2 | in-pricing, in-store-selfhosted |
| Additional Data Ingest (SaaS add-on) | custom | SaaS add-on | $21.2 | in-policies, in-store-saas |
| Logs in context, 30-day retention (SaaS add-on) | custom | SaaS add-on, 1,000 GB blocks | $371 | in-pricing, in-store-saas |
| Logs in context overage, 30-day retention (SaaS add-on) | custom | SaaS add-on, overage billed monthly | $4.45 | in-store-saas |
| Instana Managed PoPs (synthetics add-on) | custom | SaaS add-on | $0.0003 | in-pricing |
How the estimate is built
The standard deployment is priced by these components (methodology). A quantity is a formula over the workload variables; free allowances are subtracted first, and a tier prices only its own band.
| Component | Line item | Quantity | Free | Tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Observability Standard MVS (traced hosts) | Observability Standard SaaS · per host-month · annual term | apm_hosts | ||
| Observability Essentials MVS (untraced hosts) | Observability Essentials SaaS · per host-month · annual term | hosts - apm_hosts | ||
| Data ingest beyond the fair-use pool (100 GB units) | Additional Data Ingest (SaaS add-on) · per custom · SaaS add-on | (span_gb + metric_samples_million * 0.1) / 100 | (325 * apm_hosts + 50 * (hosts - apm_hosts)) / 100 | |
| Logs in context, 30-day retention (whole 1,000 GB units) | Logs in context, 30-day retention (SaaS add-on) · per custom · SaaS add-on, 1,000 GB blocks | -ceil(-log_gb / 1000) + min(1, max(0, ceil(log_gb + 1000 * ceil(-log_gb / 1000) - 830))) | ||
| Logs in context overage, 30-day retention (10 GB units, remainder up to 830 GB) | Logs in context overage, 30-day retention (SaaS add-on) · per custom · SaaS add-on, overage billed monthly | ceil((log_gb + 1000 * ceil(-log_gb / 1000)) / 10) * (1 - min(1, max(0, ceil(log_gb + 1000 * ceil(-log_gb / 1000) - 830)))) |
Example monthly bills
The same four illustrative workloads as the calculator, at list price. "At least" means a price the vendor does not state is left out of the total.
| Workload | Per month | Note | Calculator |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $247 | Open Starter in the calculator→ | |
| Small | $566 | Open Small in the calculator→ | |
| Medium | $6,057 | Open Medium in the calculator→ | |
| Large | $60,125 | Open Large in the calculator→ |
Capabilities
What IBM Instana offers, by the definitions in the dataset. Add-on means a separately priced product.
| Capability | Level | Sources |
|---|---|---|
| Ai root cause AI-assisted root-cause analysis or investigation agent | Partial | in-pricing |
| Alerting Alert rules with routing/notification | Yes | in-terraform |
| Fedramp FedRAMP authorized (state level in note) | Yes | in-fedramp-2026 |
| Llm observability LLM/agent tracing, token and cost tracking, evaluations | Yes | in-pricing |
| Logs Log management | Yes | in-policies, in-pricing, in-store-saas |
| Mcp server Exposes an MCP server for agents | Yes | in-mcp |
| Metrics Metrics | Yes | in-policies |
| Observability as code Terraform provider / dashboards-and-alerts as code | Yes | in-terraform |
| Otel collector distro Ships or supports its own OpenTelemetry Collector distribution | Yes | in-otelcol-distro |
| Otlp ingest Accepts OTLP (gRPC or HTTP) natively, without a proprietary agent in the path | Yes | in-otel-docs |
| Proprietary agent required Full functionality needs the vendor's own agent (yes = lock-in signal) | Partial | in-otel-docs, in-pricing |
| Rum Real-user monitoring (browser/mobile) | Yes | in-policies, in-pricing |
| Saas Vendor-hosted SaaS | Yes | in-pricing, in-store-payg, in-store-saas |
| Sampling tail Tail-based trace sampling | No | in-apm, in-policies |
| Self hosted Customer can run it on its own infrastructure | Yes | in-pricing, in-selfhosted |
| Service map Auto-discovered service/topology map | Yes | in-pricing |
| Slo management First-class SLO/error-budget objects | Yes | in-terraform |
| Synthetics Synthetic monitoring | Yes | in-pricing, in-store-saas |
| Traces Distributed tracing | Yes | in-policies |
Sources
Every page cited above, with the date it was read. Third-party pages are marked; a price stated only by a third party is shown as not stated.
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