Switching to Instana from IBM Tivoli Monitoring 6.3

IBM Instana Observability offers enhanced observability, analysis, and troubleshooting capabilities for the users who switched from IBM Tivoli Monitoring 6.3.

The following sections explain the core concepts of Instana and show how you can use the capabilities of Instana to achieve the same goals as IBM Tivoli Monitoring 6.3.

For an overview of Instana with sample data, use the sandbox trial. Use the guided tours to learn some of the key capabilities and flows of Instana. To access the additional capabilities, including administrative tasks, request a 14-day SaaS trial or work with your sales team to set up an on-prem trial.

For more in-depth documentation, webinars, ebooks, and articles, see Resources.

Comparing Instana capabilities with IBM Tivoli Monitoring 6.3

The following table compares the capabilities of Instana with IBM Tivoli Monitoring 6.3.

Capabilities Instana IBM Tivoli Monitoring 6.3
Resource monitoring (a rich set of available metrics) Available
Instana collects fewer metrics, but collects them at a much more granular interval, which improves the thoroughness of the analysis and enhances the accuracy of the findings. In addition, Instana provides monitoring for a number of modern technologies that are not covered by IBM Tivoli Monitoring, including public clouds, private clouds, NoSQL databases, Kafka, and so on.
For more information, see Configuring and monitoring supported technologies.
Available
End-to-End transaction tracking and tracing Available
Instana offers a relatively faster and easier setup for tracing than ITCAM. Compared to ITCSM, Instana also provides a significantly broader set of coverage, including PHP, Python, Node.js, and more. The user interface of Instana provides you with options to diagnose issues in transactions and identify the root cause. Additionally, Instana captures 100% of the transactions. This includes the EUM (End-User Monitoring) data that helps you to diagnose problems in the user devices and helps ensure that you don’t miss intermittent problems.
For more information, see Tracing in Instana.
Partially available
IBM Tivoli Monitoring v6 has end-to-end capabilities including z/OS, but only for traditional environments.
Deep dive diagnostics Available
For more information, see Using Instana.
Partially available
Separate ITCAM Management Server is required with a different user interface.
RUM/DEM Available
For more information, see Configuring end-user monitoring.
Not available
Custom monitoring Partially available
Custom data can be processed by using Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, or statsd and visualized in custom dashboards. 
For more information, see Custom monitoring and Configuring and monitoring supported technologies.
Available
Reporting (enable reporting and out of the box reports) Partially available
Instana supports reporting with external tools such as Grafana Enterprise. In addition, you can extract data from Instana by using REST APIs, which can then be used with other reporting solutions.
For more information, see Reporting and Grafana.
Available
Third-party integration (email, NOI, ServiceNow, WAIOps, and so on) Available
Instana provides built-in support for third party and AIOps integration. Key integrations include ServiceNow, Pager Duty, Microsoft Teams Splunk, and email.
For more information, see Creating Instana integrations.
Partially available
IBM Tivoli Monitoring v6 offers a stronger integration with NOI because of the granular customization by using EIF slot customization.
Metric and transaction granularity Available
Instana collects data at a significantly higher granularity than IBM Tivoli Monitoring and ITCAM. Most metrics are collected at 1-second intervals. Also, Instana captures 100% of the transactions.
For more information, see Data retention policy.
Available
Synthetics (websites, REST, SOAP, thick clients, protocol testing) Available
Instana offers REST API synthetics and scripted REST API synthetics. Instana also offers a preview of web-based synthetics through Selenium. However, Instana misses thick client synthetics for SAP and Citrix and protocol synthetics through the ITCAM for ISM.
For more information, see Synthetic monitoring.
Partially available
IBM Tivoli Monitoring does not offer REST API synthetics.
Traditional coverage Partially available
Instana provides monitoring for a number of modern technologies that are not covered by IBM Tivoli Monitoring, such as public clouds, private clouds, NoSQL databases, and Kafka. Instana also provides SNMP-based Agentless OS monitoring for Linux, and remote monitoring for IBM. You can monitor other platforms by using an agent that is run on the server. However, Instana currently does not offer coverage for traditional packaged applications such as Active Directory, Exchange, PeopleSoft, and Siebel.
Available
IBM Tivoli Monitoring v6 covers both Z and distributed. However, you must purchase OMEGAMON separately.
Cloud-native and Kubernetes coverage Available
For more information, see Monitoring Kubernetes.
Not available
Paas and IaaS coverage Available
For more information, see Instana cloud service agents.
Not available
Root cause analysis Available
For more information, see Root cause analysis.
Partially available
Thresholding including baselining and analytics Partially available
Instana offers most of the thresholding capabilities. However, the tools for the purpose might vary from IBM Tivoli Monitoring. If you use IBM Tivoli Monitoring, you can use tacmd bulkexportsit to export your current Situations that are configured in IBM Tivoli Monitoring and send them to IBM Support. IBM Support can help you determine which Situations can be migrated to Instana.
For more information on analytics and thresholding, see Unbounded analytics and Type of threshold.
Partially available
Customizable UI Partially available
Instana provides a curated set of intuitive dashboards that helps you to get to the root cause of a problem. However, you cannot customize these dashboards as in IBM Tivoli Monitoring v6. Customization can be accomplished only by using custom dashboards.
For more information, see Building custom dashboards.
Available
Total cost of ownership (includes discovery, config, tagging, and patching) Low
Instana has a low cost of ownership. In Instana, you deploy a single agent for a host instead of separate agents for each technology. The agent then automatically discovers technologies and configures sensors to monitor the discovered technologies. You can also configure the agents to update and fix automatically. Because of the cloud-native architecture, the Instana backend requires fewer servers. Updates and fixes are applied to the entire backend server instead of updating each component as in IBM Tivoli Monitoring (Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server, Tivoli Enterprise Portal Server, and each RTEMS). Therefore, you have fewer servers to license and maintain. However, being a cloud-native application, the cost of hardware for Instana deployments might be higher.
Comparatively higher
IBM Tivoli Monitoring requires a larger number of servers, which might increase the cost of ownership.
Enterprise readiness (scalability, HA/DR, and so on) Partially available
The cloud-native, microservices-based design of Instana helps ensure that the application is highly available. The Custom Edition of Instana provides high availability and resiliency that is built into it. You can also manually configure Instana for disaster recovery. Agents can be configured to send data to multiple Instana backend servers to enable disaster recovery. You can use REST APIs to copy the configuration from the primary environment to the standby.
Available
Log monitoring Partially available
Instana collects logs from application runtimes in context with traces. Instana can collect logs from Kubernetes and OpenShift Container Platform containers and ASCII logs on virtual machines. Instana also has integration with Humio, Splunk, LogDNA, and ELK. However, Instana does not have ASCII log collection on AIX or Solaris. For this purpose, you must set up a centralized syslog server to centralize the logs and then monitor through a Linux server. Instana also does not offer monitoring for AIX Error Report Log (Binary log).
For more information, see Logging.
Available
Reflex automation Available
For more information, see Managing actions.
Partially available
Automated agent installation and patching Available
Instana requires only one agent for a host. You can configure Instana for automated deployments and maintenance. Maintenance tasks such as agent and sensor updates can be automatically applied. Additionally, you can use GitOps for centralized administration of version updates.
For more information, see Installing Instana agents.
Available
Service-level objectives Available
For more information, see Service level objectives (SLO).
Not available
Manual Take Action, Put File, Get File Partially available
For more information, see Action catalog.
Available
Send metric or log data to 3rd-party tools Available
For more information, see Integrations, SDKs, and APIs.
Partially available
Maintenance windows Available
For more information, see Scheduling maintenance windows.
Not available
SaaS offering Available
For more information, see Instana SaaS deployments.
Not available

For information about the Instana user interface and to learn the basic navigation through the user interface, see Working with the user interface.

Instana is structured around pre-made entity-based dashboards. Instana automatically creates dashboards for your physical and logical entities. For example, you can find a dashboard for each of your hosts or your Kubernetes nodes. These dashboards contain the Dynamic Graph, which provides you with a graphical view of all connected entities. On a Kubernetes dashboard, you can then see all the containers that support the specific element or all the applications and services that are running on it.

In the Infrastructure view in Instana, you can see a map of all your hosts and containers and see the processes and VMs that are running on them. When an issue is detected, you can also identify the problematic hosts and the source of the incident. The Dynamic Graph of Instana also shows you all the impacted entities and also identifies if they are physical or logical.

Installing Instana

Instana can be deployed either as a SaaS solution with the option of retaining data in the cloud, or as a self-hosted (on-premises) solution. With Instana, you have control of where your data is stored. So, Instana combines the simplicity of SaaS with the control of an on-premises deployment. For more information, see Instana deployment options.

See the following deployments options for Instana:

For more information, see Installation options.

The Custom Edition of Instana self-hosted deployment is highly customizable. You can choose your own Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift platform and configure with the storage provider of your choice. The Standard Edition has limited deployment options and is suitable only if the number of servers is 2250 or less with 25 call/second call rate.

Data retention in Instana

Depending on the type of data, Instana applies varying data retentions. For more information, see Data retention policy.

If you use the Instana SaaS offering, you cannot configure the retention intervals. However, for on-prem (self-hosted) deployments, you can configure the historical retention.

Installing Instana agents

Instana requires only a single agent for a host unlike IBM Tivoli Monitoring, which required a separate agent for each application and middleware. The Instana agent runs as a separate process and discovers technologies that are running in your environment. Based on the discovered technologies, the agent automatically deploys technology-specific sensors, which send appropriate metrics back to the agent. The Instana agent sends these metrics to the Instana backend.

For more information on Instana agents, see About Instana agents.

Note: Instana does not have an equivalent for the autonomous agents in IBM Tivoli Monitoring. If you require the capabilities of an autonomous agent in Instana, you must set up a backend server infrastructure (for SaaS).

The installation of Instana agents involves the following steps:

  1. Check the Instana agent requirements and Instana agent sensor requirements.

  2. Check the types of Instana agents.

    The type of agent varies based on the systems that you want to monitor in your environment. For example, host agents that run on your host to collect and aggregate data, cloud service agents that monitor services that are managed by cloud providers, and so on. In host agents, you can also choose between static agents and dynamic agents for more control over updates and versions. For more information, see Host agent types.

  3. Install the required agent.

After you install the agent, see Using Instana to learn how to use the features of Instana to achieve the same business goals as in IBM Tivoli Monitoring.