Instana 2023: Summary of Latest Innovations

Since you requested it, we have delivered it to you! At Instana, creating simple tools that address customer needs and are easy to use is fundamental to helping DevOps and SRE teams reduce burnout and excel at what they do best. Taking all your feedback and market insights into perspective and careful consideration, we are excited to announce this in 2023.

Our team has announced a number of product features designed to simplify teams’ ability to observe, debug, troubleshoot, and improve the entire stack, and to seamlessly integrate observability practices and telemetry data into the entire software development lifecycle.

Here’s a comprehensive rundown of everything coming in 2023, what it’s winning, links to the latest updates, and how to get started with each improvement.

Turbo economic integration (beta)

We have launched a two-way integration with Turbonomic, a milestone that means a lot to our customers. We understand the impact of downtime, with the average cost being $220,000 per hour. Organizations estimate that 32% of their cloud spend is wasted, leading many IT professionals to ask, ‘How can I get the most out of my applications?’ The answer lies in choosing an integrated solution.

• State-of-the-art, two-way integration with Turbonomic is designed to empower IT teams to move from reactive to proactive and preventive.
• With these enhancements, the integration provides greater control over your stack by associating Turbonomic recommendations with ongoing incidents in Instana.

Join our webinar to learn more.

Users can also analyze the impact of turbo job execution on underlying entity KPIs. Learn more in the announcement blog.

Top-notch OpenTelemetry support

Full-stack observability requires thorough visibility and understanding. OpenTelemetry serves as an indispensable tool for achieving comprehensive visibility and promoting streamlined workflow through common instrumentation, portable formats, and interoperable pipelines. OpenTelemetry instrumentation is the foundation of observability for next-generation cloud and hybrid applications. Instana has tightly integrated OpenTelemetry into its core product and expanded its offering.

• Full support for OTLP metrics, tracking, and logs via Instana Agent and SaaS API.
• Industry-leading blended tracing combining OpenTelemetry and Instana AutoTrace ranges.
• Improvements to OpenTelemetry metrics in Instana, including support for metric labels and histogram tools.

• The Instana agent powers OpenTelemetry metrics and traces delivered by all exporters, including the OpenTelemetry collector.
• We have extended the database server monitoring support of OpenTelemetry and Instana by providing semantic rules for database servers and providing the open source OpenTelemetry Database Data Collector.
• Contributions to the OpenTelemetry SDK for JavaScript and PHP have improved the ability to connect entities from Instana and OpenTelemetry sources.
• We are supporting C++ tracing and metrics through our officially maintained fork of the OpenTelemetry C++ SDK. Read the documentation to learn more.

Comprehensive monitoring

Comprehensive monitoring lets you see how your applications are performing in advance. It helps you find and fix performance issues before they bother your customers.

We understand that companies want their businesses to run smoothly at speed and scale. So we’re committed to helping them achieve this through observability and incident response automation, especially where we have differentiating capabilities.​

• We’ve expanded comprehensive monitoring so you can be notified when APIs and transactions aren’t performing properly anywhere.
• We’ve also added the ability to generate synthetic browser tests. This feature is currently in open beta. This update allows your tests to mimic your web application’s default workflow and user interactions, so you can immediately see when the default workflow is broken and take action to resolve the issue. You don’t have to be an expert to use this feature. The system allows you to code scripts using Selenium IDE extensions and then import them into Instana.

To learn more about this update, watch the New Release Webinar.

End User Monitoring

We’ve expanded End User Monitoring (EUM) support to include crash analysis functionality, now in open beta. We would appreciate it if you could try it and give us feedback.

Mobile developers get all the information in a single tool. Full-stack mobile applications track backend traces generated by application calls.

We’ve also added the ability to automatically instrument your website!

• This feature allows you to gain automatic end-to-end visibility into application performance from the user’s browser, right down to executed database queries, without changing the source code of the monitored application. This feature enhances the infrastructure map to show where your website is hosted.

SAP Observability

Real-time monitoring is essential for SAP BTP cloud native applications.

• We have expanded our coverage and now Instana supports monitoring SAP BTP Kyma clusters.
• We did the same with the SAP ABAP sensor, which is used to monitor platform and transaction metrics in the ABAP stack. It’s currently in beta, but we encourage customers to try it out and provide feedback.

By integrating performance metrics from SAP Solution Manager (SolMan) into Instana, users can view and manage both SAP and non-SAP metrics from a single pane of glass. SolMan alerts are also delivered, allowing you to identify issues across your entire IT environment from a single tool. Learn more about these improvements in our blog announcement.

intelligent behavior

Some users may have noticed a new automation icon in the IBM® Instana® Observability main menu. We released a task framework that allows you to create new tasks or reuse existing automation (e.g. Ansible®, PagerDuty, etc.). Tasks can then be associated with various Instana events and appear on each event occurrence as a potential task to execute.

You can also leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to get action recommendations based on event context. Read the blog announcement to learn more.

Differentiated logging for cloud-native environments

In July 2023, we expanded our coverage to support logging monitoring capabilities with unlimited analytics for rich log analysis and unparalleled support for your root cause analysis journey.

• With in-context logs, where all logs are correlated with the appropriate infrastructure components and distributed trace data, logs serve as another great source of insight when analyzing incidents.
• With Instana Logging, you don’t need to manually tag or instrument to get a high-fidelity view of your logs in context! As Instana analyzes your logs, it automatically analyzes correlations and displays them directly in a comprehensive view.

• Additionally, to support cloud-native environments, Instana Agent now automatically collects logs from Docker and included runtimes with the same context support described above.
• Additionally, you can now run OpenTelemtry log collection in a private beta program to ingest arbitrary logs from any source into Instana. Currently it is a manual approach, but a fully automated approach is planned for a range of technologies in the second and third quarters of 2024. To learn more about this update, watch the New Release Webinar.

Business Observability

Last year we announced new business monitoring capabilities that make business context observable. Business context adds a fourth layer on top of the existing APM observability layers of end-to-end application performance, middleware state, and infrastructure.

• The new launch enables Instana to automatically understand the business context of IT issues for customers who use IBM Cloud Pak® for Business Automation, Camunda, and jBPM to automate business execution.
• Optionally, Instana customers can extract critical business data from workflow executions to help them understand the true impact of IT issues in these environments.

To learn more, watch our webinar where we discuss business observability in detail.

Product integration (IBM MQ, DB Marlin)

Through the innovative partnership between DB Marlin and IBM Instana™, businesses can now gain detailed insight into database performance like never before. Enhances product integrations to deliver a wide range of database performance monitoring and optimization efforts. Please read the blog announcement for more details.

Terraform integration

Instana now supports the Terraform provider https://github.com/instana/terraform-provider-instana with the help of customer contributions.

Awards

In 2023, IBM Instana received recognition from CRN. This is the best partner-friendly product that has been released and significantly improved over the past year. Mike Mallo, Director of Product Management at Instana, said he was thrilled to receive this award. “This achievement is a testament to the hard work and dedication of our team with a high level of focus on the user experience for cloud-native workloads. We appreciate the support of our partners and look forward to continued innovation in the coming year. This award motivates us to strive for greater success in the future.”

Read the press release for more details.

Observability in numbers

IBM Instana, an IBM observability solution, is purpose-built for cloud native and designed to automatically and continuously deliver high-fidelity data (with sub-second granularity and end-to-end tracking), taking into account logical and physical dependencies across mobile. . , web, applications and infrastructure.

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Want to experience Instana’s observability innovation for yourself? Sign up for a free trial today so you can spend less time debugging and more time building.

We’d also like to hear from you! If you see new improvements you’d like to see, please leave your ideas in the IBM Instana Ideas Portal.

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