Every category where a model named IBM Instana for a mid-market B2B company. Share is first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts; rank is within every product named in that category.

Category	Function	Share	Rank	Negative rate	Labels	Quadrant
Application performance monitoring	IT operations and endpoint	2%	5 of 70	7%	14	accepted challenger
Observability platforms	IT operations and endpoint	0%	34 of 63	0%	2	under 10 labels · led by Grafana at 29%
Infrastructure monitoring	IT operations and endpoint	0%	51 of 65	0%	1	under 10 labels · led by Site24x7 at 24%

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for IBM Instana yet. From the next edition this section shows, per buyer segment, whether its share moved by more than the measured noise floor.

By model

How each model treated IBM Instana across every prompt where it was named for a mid-market B2B company. Twelve models, six prompts per category.

Model	First choice	Alternative	Mention	Negative	Labels
Claude Haiku 4.5	1	0	1	0	2
GPT-5.4 mini	0	0	0	0	0
Gemini 3.5 Flash	0	0	1	0	1
Perplexity Sonar	0	1	0	0	1
Grok 4.1 Fast	0	0	1	0	1
Mistral Small	0	1	2	0	3
DeepSeek V4 Flash	0	0	0	1	1
Llama 4 Maverick	0	1	0	0	1
Qwen 3.7 Flash	0	2	0	0	2
Kimi K2	0	0	1	0	1
GLM 4.7 FlashX	0	1	0	0	1
MiniMax M2.5	0	2	1	0	3

By framing

Which of the six questions produced the naming. By model says how often; this says asked what. The first-choice count on the right carries the marks of the models that produced it.

FramingLabels by classFirst choices

Direct4 labelsNone

Paraphrase14 labels1

Comparative18 labelsNone

Budget-constrained0 labelsNone

Scale-constrained1 labelNone

Negative6 labelsNone

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative43 labels in all, every segment counted; 1 of the 1 first choices count toward share, since the comparative and negative framings do not. The bar is one segment per label class, to scale within the framing.

What the models said for it

Verbatim evidence the judge attached to positive labels.

“I'd particularly recommend Instana if you want ease of deployment and transparent pricing” Claude Haiku 4.5 · APM · paraphrase prompt · first choice

“Offers zero-configuration monitoring with automatic service discovery and real-time dependency mapping” Llama 4 Maverick · APM · paraphrase prompt · alternative

“If your environment is highly dynamic or complex, IBM Instana is a strong alternative.” Mistral Small · APM · paraphrase prompt · alternative

“Best for: Companies with complex microservice architectures needing rapid setup” MiniMax M2.5 · APM · paraphrase prompt · alternative

And against it

Verbatim evidence attached to negative labels. A warning on a product with few labels is a warning; on a product with many, it is one voice among them.

“Be cautious if you have a small team without dedicated reliability engineers to manage the complexity.” DeepSeek V4 Flash · APM · negative prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as IBM Instana, over the 43 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and IBM Instana was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Datadog40 of 4319Not in the top three

New Relic39 of 437Not in the top three

Dynatrace33 of 438Not in the top three

AppDynamics21 of 430Not in the top three

Grafana Cloud13 of 431Not in the top three

Sentry12 of 430Not in the top three

Site24x78 of 431Not in the top three

Elastic APM8 of 430Not in the top three

Elastic Observability8 of 430Not in the top three

ManageEngine Applications Manager7 of 430Not in the top three

A head-to-head page exists where both products are in a category's top three. The other rows are the same fact without a page behind them, so they link to the product instead.

What carried it into the answer

The sites and pages cited by the answers that named IBM Instana. A fact about retrieval, not a lever on the model.

Citations exist only for the models that return a source list, four of the twelve in this edition, so these counts come from 39 of the 43 answers that named IBM Instana and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

newrelic.com19

g2.com17

learn.g2.com17

reveillesoftware.com17

rollbar.com14

instatus.com13

openobserve.ai12

cubeapm.com11

middleware.io11

toolradar.com10

141 of the 141 domain citations in answers naming IBM Instana came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

reveillesoftware.com/blog/blog/14-best-application-performance-monitoring-apm-tools-202417

learn.g2.com/best-application-performance-monitoring-tools14

rollbar.com/blog/best-apm-tools14

instatus.com/blog/apm-tools13

newrelic.com/blog/apm/application-performance-monitoring-tools13

openobserve.ai/blog/top-10-apm-tools12

ardura.consulting/blog/apm-tools-comparison-20268

cubeapm.com/blog/top-apm-tools-features-pricing-usecases8

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Names read as IBM Instana

What the judge wrote, as written, with how often. The vendor table decides that these count as IBM Instana; a claim can dispute any of them.

Instana 3IBM 1IBM Instana (Observability) 1Instana (IBM) 1Instana (IBM-backed) 1

Is this your product?

Claim this page

Claiming is free and changes nothing in the data. A claimed page shows a verified contact who is told when each edition publishes and when IBM Instana's standing changes by more than the noise floor; the right to propose corrections to the vendor table, meaning names the judge wrote that should or should not read as IBM Instana, applied by version and listed in the change log; and a one-line description supplied by the vendor and marked as such.

It does not get any change to labels, shares or verdicts, any preview, or any say over which quotes appear. A verification link goes to your work email; an address at ibm.com is approved on the spot, any other address is reviewed by hand.

Your name and company appear on the claimed page, or the company alone if you ask below. A title and a LinkedIn address appear there too if you give them, and are left off if you do not. Your email address is never published.