Instana pricing

Unlimited users, unlimited applications. No hidden fees, no surprises.
Interconnected hexagon representing a network of servers connected to the cloud

Simple. Predictable. Affordable.

Here's why users and analysts love Instana's pricing model compared to competitors:  

All inclusive pricing

Instana

List price

75 USD*

per MVS1 per month

  • Lower price for comparable feature set
  • Simple, easy to understand pricing
  • Transparent, predictable costs
  • All-inclusive plan: All essential features at no additional cost
  • No caps on metrics or traces data

1MVS - Managed Virtual Server (host)

 

Competitor's pricing

List price

580 USD

per MVS1 per month

  • Complicated pricing models
  • Hidden costs
  • Higher price for comparable feature set
  • Non-inclusive plans with additional costs
  • Cap on metrics and traces data



*Prices shown are indicative, may vary by country, exclude any applicable taxes and duties, and are subject to product offering availability in a locale.

Pricing Plans

Essentials Tier (SaaS) List price USD 20 / MVS / month*

Best suited for Infrastructure Monitoring Needs

  • Infrastructure Monitoring
  • 1-second monitoring granularity
  • 3-second change notification and alerting
  • Limited platform features
  • No limit on number of users
  • Any size hosts
  • Encrypted data handling
Try without a credit card
Standard Tier (SaaS) List price USD 75 / MVS / month* All-in-one

Best suited for full-stack observability (from infrastructure, to end-user)

  • Everything in Essentials
  • Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
  • Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM)
  • Software Delivery
  • Logs
  • AI Observability
  • All Platform features
  • No sampling
  • Automatic discovery and change detection
  • Global deployment options at no additional cost
Try without a credit card
Self-Hosted Enterprise

 

  • Both Essentials and Standard tier available
  • Deploy on premises, in a hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud environment.
  • No limit on data ingests
  • Data never leaves your environment
  • Logs-in-context included at no additional charge
Request a discounted quote

*Prices shown are indicative, may vary by country, exclude any applicable taxes and duties, and are subject to product offering availability in a locale.

Add-ons:

Instana Managed PoPs

Execute synthetic tests from multiple locations around the world, managed by Instana.

  • Includes Synthetic Tests
  • Starting at USD 0.0003* per execution

Logs in context

Ingest Logs from any source with flexible retention options of 30, 60 or 90 days.

  • Starting at USD 0.35*/ GB

Buy now

Pay-as-you-go

Not sure about your needs? Try our pay-as-you-go offering on IBM Marketplace

starting at

0.03 USD*

per MVS hour



Buy now

*Prices shown are indicative, may vary by country, exclude any applicable taxes and duties, and are subject to product offering availability in a locale.

How we calculate our prices

Our pricing is simple.

The price you pay = Number of MVS(s) * Your discounted price per MVS


IBM offers flexible pricing options and volume discounts. Request a quote unique to your needs.

Features

Essentials Tier

Standard Tier

Self-Hosted

Distributed tracing

Automatic service discovery and mapping

Application perspective

End to end tracing

Serverless Monitoring

Container Runtime Monitoring

Topology

Infrastructure Monitoring, Map and API

Discover cloud and hybrid resources

Kubernetes

Website Monitoring (Including SPA)

Mobile monitoring

Crash Analysis

Infrastructure correlation

Intelligent Remediation

Incident Summarization

AI/LLM Observability

OTEL data collection

Unbound Analytics

Team association leveraging tags for alert channels and smart alerts

SNOW ITSM App

*Prices shown are indicative, may vary by country, exclude any applicable taxes and duties, and are subject to product offering availability in a locale.

Frequently asked questions

A Managed Virtual Server (MVS) is a unit of measure by which Instana can be licensed. It can comprise physical machines, virtual servers or worker nodes. Physical machines can be physical computers, blades, rack-mounted devices or anything else comprised of processing units, memory and input/output capabilities that execute applications or portions of applications. A virtual server is either a virtual computer created by partitioning the resources of a physical server or an unpartitioned physical server. Licensee must obtain an MVS license for each virtual server managed.

Instana Observability Essentials pricing plan focuses on basic infrastructure discovery, mapping, and monitoring, while the Observability Standard pricing plan provides more application-centric, advanced features like code-level visibility, tracing, log management, and real-time change detection.

Yes, you can start your Instana Free Trial today to experience our monitoring solutions firsthand.

Instana offers various support options, including comprehensive documentation, community forums for peer-to-peer support and knowledge sharing, as well as direct customer support channels for assistance with any issues or questions you may have. These support options ensure that you have access to the resources and assistance you need to make the most of Instana's solutions.

No. At Instana, we believe that infrastructure monitoring, end-user monitoring (EUM), and analytics are all core functions of a great APM tool. As such, everything is included in the APM licensing. Check out common observability myths.

A standard Instana license is available on a minimum order quantity of 10 hosts and includes access for unlimited number of users and support for 300+ technologies.

Yes. Instana is a member of The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and welcomes the use of many open-source technologies. Instana makes it very easy for our users to see their open source traces and metrics alongside, and correlated with, Instana’s natively collected metrics and traces.

This fair use policy provides 325 GB of data ingestion per Standard SaaS MVS (former APM) and 50 GB of data ingestion per Essentials SaaS MVS (former IQM) per month. IBM allows this data to be ingested on average across all entitlements. For example, if you have 10 Standard SaaS MVS, the total amount of data by default is 3250 GB across these 10 licenses. It does not matter how much data an individual MVS ingests; customers stay within their policy as long as the total data ingested is, at most, 3250 GB.

The data ingest is not capped; clients are allowed to use more than their Fair use Entitlement value. If a client adopted more data ingest than their entitled Data ingest, this is visible as On-Demand Data Ingest. For customers with exceptional data ingestion needs, Instana offers an add-on providing additional capacity for regular use cases and an on-demand ‘pay-per-use’ option.

At Instana, our commitment to privacy and security has led us to complete our SOC 2 requirements and audit successfully. With this certification you have peace of mind, knowing that there has been an independent and full review of Instana’s security that verified the appropriateness in the design of controls regarding availability, processing integrity and confidentiality of the service.

Instana Automates the entire application monitoring. Instana bills on a per host, per month, billed annually, which is more predictable than other competitors. See the six reasons why users are switching