Instana 2023: Recapping our latest innovation – IBM Blog

You asked, and we delivered! At Instana, addressing our customers’ needs and creating a simple tool that is easy to use is fundamental to helping our DevOps and SRE teams reduce burnout rates, allowing them to excel in what they do best. Taking all your feedback and market insights into perspective and careful consideration, we are thrilled to announce that in 2023.

Our team announced different product capabilities designed to simplify your teams’ ability to observe, debug, remediate and enhance your entire stack—integrating observability practices and telemetry data seamlessly into your entire software development lifecycle.

Here’s a comprehensive recap of everything we launched in 2023, awards and links to the latest update and how you can get started with each enhancement.

Turbonomic integration (Beta)

 We have launched a bi-directional integration with Turbonomic, a milestone that holds great significance for our customers. We understand the impact of downtime, with the average cost being $220K per hour. Organizations estimate that 32% of cloud spend is wasted, prompting many IT professionals to ask, ‘How do you get the most from and for your applications?’ The answer lies in choosing integrated solutions.

• Our cutting-edge bi-directional integration with Turbonomic is designed to empower your IT team, transforming them from reactive to proactive and preventative.
• With this enhancement, the integration will correlate Turbonomic recommendations to an ongoing incident in Instana, providing you with greater control over your stack.

Furthermore, users can analyze the impact of executing Turbo actions on the underlying entity KPIs. Learn more in our announcement blog.

First-class OpenTelemetry support

Full-stack observability demands thorough visibility and comprehension. OpenTelemetry serves as an indispensable tool for achieving comprehensive visibility, facilitating streamlined practices with common instrumentation, portable formats and interoperable pipelines. OpenTelemetry instrumentation moves to become the foundation of observability for the next wave of cloud and hybrid applications. Instana has deeply integrated OpenTelemetry with our core product and has expanded the coverage that we provide:

• Full support for OTLP metrics, traces and logs in the Instana Agent and via our SaaS API.
• Industry-leading mixed tracing combining OpenTelemetry and Instana AutoTrace spans.
• Enhancements to OpenTelemetry metrics in Instana, including support for metric labels and histogram instruments.

• The Instana Agent enriches OpenTelemetry metrics and traces forwarded by any exporter, including OpenTelemetry collectors.
• We have contributed semantic conventions for database servers and provided the open source OpenTelemetry Database Data Collector, expanding OpenTelemetry and Instana’s support for monitoring database servers.
• We have improved the capabilities for linking entities from Instana and OpenTelemetry sources through contributions to the OpenTelemetry SDKs for JavaScript and PHP.
• We are supporting C++ tracing and metrics through an officially maintained fork of the OpenTelemetry C++ SDK. Learn more by reading our documentation.

Synthetic monitoring

With synthetic monitoring, you can check how your application works in advance. It helps you find and solve performance problems before they bother your customers.

We understand that companies want to operate their business smoothly with both speed and scale. Hence, our commitment to help you achieve just that—through observability and incident response automation—especially where we have differentiated capabilities.​

• We have extended our synthetic monitoring to make sure you get notified when your APIs and transactions are not performing properly (from any location).
• Additionally, we have also added the capability to create synthetic browser tests. The capability is currently in open beta. With this update, your tests can mimic the interaction of the users with the main workflows in your web application, allowing you to immediately know when your main workflows are broken and take action to fix them. This feature can be used even when you are not an expert. The system enables you to code the script by using the Selenium IDE extension and then import it to Instana.

Watch our new release webinar to learn more about this update.

End user monitoring

We have extended our end user monitoring (EUM) support with the inclusion of crash analysis functionality, which is currently in open beta. We welcome you to try it and provide feedback.

 Mobile developers will have all the information in a single tool. Full-stack mobile application traces to the backend traces generated by the application calls.

We have also added the capability of automatically instrument websites!

• With this feature, you will be able to have automatic end-to-end visibility on your application’s performance from your user’s browser, all the way down to the database query that was executed without any change in the source code of the monitored application. By using this feature, your infrastructure map will be enriched to show where the websites are hosted.

SAP observability

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

• We extended our coverage and currently, Instana supports SAP BTP Kyma cluster monitoring.
• We also did the same for our SAP ABAP sensor, which is used to monitor the platform and transaction metrics from the ABAP stack. While this is currently in beta, clients are encouraged to try it and provide feedback.

Users can integrate performance metrics from SAP Solution Manager (SolMan) into Instana to view and manage both SAP and non-SAP metrics from a single pane of glass. SolMan alerts are also forwarded enabling you to identify problems from your entire IT landscape from a single tool. Read more about this enhancement in our blog announcement.

Intelligent actions

 Some of our users may have noticed a new automation icon in the IBM® Instana® Observability main menu. We announced our action framework, where you can create new actions or reuse your existing automation (e.g., Ansible®, PagerDuty, etc.). Actions can then be associated with various Instana events and will be visible to each event occurrence as potential actions to run.

You can also leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to get action recommendations based on event context. Learn more by reading our blog announcement

Differentiated logging for cloud-native environments

July 2023, we extended our coverage to support logging monitoring feature with unbounded analytics for rich log analytics and great support for the Root Cause Analysis journey.

• With our logs in context, which are all logs correlated to appropriate infrastructure components and distributed trace data where available, logs serve as another great source of insights when analysing incidents.
• With Instana Logging, no manual tagging or instrumentation is required to get to the high-fidelity view of logs in context! Instana automatically does the correlation and presents it in a comprehensive view directly when analyzing logs.

• In addition, to support cloud native environments, Instana Agent now collects logs from Docker and contained runtimes automatically, with the same context support as described above.
• Furthermore, we now run our OpenTelemtry log ingestion in a closed beta program, allowing to ingest arbitrary logs from any source into Instana. Although currently a manual approach, this is planned to be fully automatic coming during 2Q24 and 3Q24 for various technologies. Watch our new release webinar to learn more about this update.

Business observability

Last year, we announced business monitoring new capability, bringing business context to observability. The business context will add a 4th layer on top of the existing APM observability layers of end-to-end application performance, middleware health and infrastructure.

• The new launch allows Instana to automatically understand the business context of IT issues for customers who have automated their business executions using IBM Cloud Pak® for Business Automation, Camunda and jBPM.
• Optionally, Instana customers can extract critical business data from executing workflows to help them understand the true impact of IT issues in these environments.

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

Product integrations (IBM MQ, DB Marlin)

With the innovative partnership between DB Marlin and IBM Instana™, businesses can now achieve granular insights into database performance like never before.  We enhance product our integration to provide extensive database performance monitoring and optimization efforts, Read our blog announcement to learn more

Terraform integration

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

Awards

2023 IBM Instana was recognised by CRN as atop partner-friendly product that launched and was significantly enhanced over the past year. Mike Mallo Head of Instana Product Management is beyond thrilled to accept this recognition, “This achievement is a testament to the hard work and dedication of our team, placing a high degree of focus on our users’ experience for cloud-native workloads. We are grateful for the support of our partners and look forward to continued innovation in the coming year. This award motivates us to strive for even greater success in the future.”

To learn more read the press announcement.

Observability by the numbers

The IBM observability solution, IBM Instana, is purpose-built for cloud-native and designed to automatically and continuously provide high-fidelity data—one-second granularity and end-to-end traces—with the context of logical and physical dependencies across mobile, web, applications and infrastructure.

Get started

Curious to experience first-hand the Instana observability innovations? Sign up for a free trial today so you can spend less time debugging and more time building.

We also love to hear from you! If you have any new enhancements you would like to see, please leave your ideas on IBM Instana idea portal.