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Instana

Kubernetes-native APM(Application Performance Monitoring) for the new-stack

What is Instana?

Instana is a Kubernetes-native APM(Application Performance Monitoring) tool which is built for new-stack including Microservices and lately Serverless but also supports the existing VM based stacks  including several supported technologies.

Instana complies with the "Automated Monitoring" approach because of its "Auto Discovery" capability which is a must for Distributed and Polyglot architectures.

Auto Discovery includes all layers from Infrastructure, Host, through containers, till the application:

Auto Discovery includes all layers all the way from Infrastructure, through containers, till the application

Once the discovery is done, Instana visualizes your stack which can be quite complex like:

Kubernetes-applications-at-scale-min-540×338

Instana differs in the APM market compared to Appdynamics, Dynatrace and NewRelic, with its 1 second granular metrics. In other words, Instana does not do any sampling, unless you give limit to CPU consumption by configuration and Instana CPU consumption becomes more than that value, which is a very rare case.

Instana is built with a "Machine Learning" capability, which continuously learns. After finding the patterns and Instana creates incidents in case there is an "Abnormal Behaviour". Anomality Detection of Instana brings agility in troubleshooting and finding the root-cause: 

IQM-Page-Image-6Instana creates visual maps of the architecture. The size and colours change based on the metrics. You can see that Instana automatically coloured on service as Red:

instana-service-map

Any type of "Change" related with the Infrastructure, configuration, deployment is marked in Instana and this helps the teams to troubleshoot, whether the unexpected behaviour(s) are happening after that Change.

Considering the 3 pillars of Observability, Tracing is a must if you have a Distributed architecture like Microservices. Although Instana has its own Tracing, it also supports CNCF Opentracing.

Here is a screenshot of the tracing, where you can see the stack trace on the right.

Instana Python Distributed Trace SQL Alchemy

Instana can be integrated with your preferred Alert Management like OpsGenie, and you can observe your Alerts on one system and create escalations based on your team structure.  

As a summary, Instana fits great with

  • Kubernetes workloads
  • Microservices Architectures
  • Complex Infrastructures
  • Automating installation, configuration and alarming

 

Do not hesitate to contact with us if you would like to initiate a PoC on your stack.

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