This week, Instana has issued its 300th release, but that’s not the coolest thing to happen in July. Last week, Instana was recognized as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms. In my eight years at Instana, I’ve seen us break into the MQ (2019) and spend time in all four quadrants along the way. I’m so proud of how the company, the team and the product have evolved and succeeded.
Automation Love at First Sight
I fell in love with Instana during the phone call with a friend to talk about the company he had just joined, and whether I might want to join. I saw that from its inception, Instana included the best parts of APM, while eliminating many of the operational inefficiencies and difficult aspects of monitoring.
The sleek gamer graphics helped, along with a UX that empowered any user to get what they needed in minutes without any official training. I was hooked – and quite thankful that the Instana team chose to include me in what has been a wonderful journey so far.
It was the automation that created the biggest “wow” moments. Simply drop in an agent (just one) and the entire stack, host map and service map would populate in minutes. But wait – there’s more. Tracing and monitoring work without any configuration. As if that weren’t enough, Instana delivered cloud-native stack visibility that legacy tools struggled to provide.
Over the years as I spoke with more customers about their use of the product, and what they had achieved, I literally saw the numbers add up in Business Value Assessments.
What’s in a Name? Analytics
Do you know how Instana got its name? It’s a combinatory form of INSTant ANAlytics, showcasing one of the reasons users love the solution.
While leading edge cloud-native visibility was a classic APM differentiator, Instana’s founders were focused on the bigger picture from the beginning. They wanted to include performance data from anywhere, not just Instana’s proprietary agent and sensors. The company was an early adopter and supported of open source observability protocols, which includes making OpenTelemetry a first class data citizen.
SaaS and On-Prem (not versus)
While most vendors offer SaaS deployment, some make the decision to offer on-prem. Instana supports both, keeping both versions at feature parity – giving users the flexibility to deploy whichever version works best for them.
Cutting Edge Then – And Now
As Instana turns 10 years old, it strikes me that the tool and the company never stopped delivering cutting edge technology. In r1, Instana delivered a powerful unprecedented combo of high granularity (one second granular monitoring) and high cardinality (a trace of every request) to go with unmatched cloud-native visibility.
We’re still adding leading edge features at release 300. Recently, Instana announced its latest AI feature, Intelligent Incident Investigation powered by agentic AI, now available in Preview. With this new feature, users can launch a full agentic AI investigation into an incident and Instana will immediately build a hypothesis to identify details of the problem, where it occurred and its impact, delivering complete knowledge of the incident in seconds.
All-Inclusive Simple and Transparent Pricing
Instana strives to stand out in the market by providing everything you need in an observability solution with simple, predictable, affordable pricing. Combined with the afore-mentioned automation, the idea is that our clients should be able to put observability on more of their applications. After all, every application is important to somebody or it wouldn’t exist.
I’m still as proud and excited to be part of Instana today as I was when I joined. You can read the full Gartner Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms report to learn more about why Gartner recognized Instana as a Leader.
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