IBM Instana is a clever solution to a problem that many of organizations face. Infrastructure in a modern day application context is incredibly diverse. It can be on-premises, in the cloud, or in containers. It can be microservices running in containers, or legacy technical debt monoliths running as containerized workloads. It can be SAS applications. It can be applications that are running in a serverless context. The point is, infrastructure models are widespread and varied. So how do we identify issues within these relationships and between all these different components? With an observability solution like IBM Instana. 

We know what you’re thinking: I’ve worked with observability layers that are separated, where there’s one layer for apps and another for infrastructure. It’s a frustrating experience to try and consolidate what’s going on between them. But with IBM Instana, you’re given insight into both applications and infrastructure, and you don’t need dozens of agents’ install processors for each infrastructure component. Yes, Instana does provide multiple deployment options. You can use it to monitor individual workloads running on Elastic Beanstalk for example, or container workloads running on Kubernetes. But with a very simple deployment mechanism, you can monitor all workloads running in a serverless architecture. The other major benefit is that this work is largely automated. 

Automatic Discovery and Automatic Detection 

The automation is twofold. Instana offers automatic discovery of workloads and automatic detection of issues. You have the option to specifically install an agent to monitor or observe one application workload, or you can deploy the Instana platform and let it discover what exists. For example, if you put it on a Kubernetes platform, Instana will determine what the container resources, pods and microservices are, and then it will figure out how they all relate to each other. Instana identifies the flow of interaction between microservices and non-containerized or non-modernized applications.  

Instana provides the benefit of cross-team visualization. 

After Instana identifies the flow of interaction, you have the ability to create something called a perspective. With a perspective you can literally take these things and group them together to visualize the impact for various stakeholders. This allows the database team, security team, networking team, infrastructure team, and any other stakeholder, to obtain information that is specific to them. They’ll receive insights as to what their dependencies are, and how information relates to their goals. Teams no longer have access to only their own information within its silo. Everyone can interact together to customize dashboards, or put in alerting mechanisms. Although this may just sound like clever aggregation, Instana takes it a step further by combining these components with AI on the backend.   

A true show of artificial intelligence machine learning. 

AI looks at all these interactions from a flow perspective, which allows the AI to perform predictive elements. It can expose queries like “is this a common occurrence within how this application has behaved historically” or “when this type of behavior is observed, this situation is occurring”. What the AI does is shift the work into a proactive monitoring and detection mode, and depending on how it’s configured, can go as far as automating correction.  

Accelerate Application Deployment 

Let’s look at how Instana speeds up DevOps. When your pipeline process picks up new code to build and deploy on a testing environment, Instana immediately looks at the behavior of that application and compares it within a historical context. It’ll highlight behaviors that are different and immediately notify the development team of any performance issues within the application stack. Instana provides feedback very early on in the build process of applications, long before they go into production or can impact customers. Likewise, security teams are able to enter the picture early on.  

Free and Easy Trial 

IBM provides a couple of very attractive ways to assess Instana as a full stack observability solution within a client’s business framework. You can take advantage of a 14-day test or trial period. During that time, you’re able to deploy Instana into your environment and validate it at no cost. You’re able to work with the installer team to configure it for your applications. You can also take advantage of a sandbox environment to play with Instana in the safest way possible, under the guidance of an IBM install team. If you believe this solution could be meaningful to your business and want to pull the trigger, it’s not a long-winded consultive process. The installer platform is extremely easy to deploy. You can start configuring and using it immediately.  

In conclusion, if you’re looking for something that provides visibility across multiple teams, and insight into applications and infrastructure, Instana is a great solution. If you’re looking for a proactive way of approaching monitoring, as well as a simple way to automate relationships, Instana is a great solution. If you want deep insight into how components are interacting with each other and you’re not wanting to granularly manage everything, Instana is a great solution. Take some time to check it out for yourself.