No matter how many metrics any monitoring tool collects, there’s always a need for custom metrics. Some want business metrics. Some want metrics derived from other metrics. The use cases for monitoring custom metrics from microservices and associated components are varied and many.

Metrics, such as KPIs, have become increasingly important in the age of microservices, containers and orchestration tools like Kubernetes. Since microservices have so many components and are deployed so frequently, metrics—both out of the box and custom— provide critical information used to determine the root cause of performance and stability issues.

Out-of-the-box metrics

The IBM Instana™ platform makes it incredibly easy to gather both out-of-the-box and custom metrics from your application services. When the IBM Instana agent is installed, it automatically discovers all service components and deploys sensors that monitor each given technology. With over 100 sensors and growing, the IBM Instana platform has you covered for just about every major technology. For additional technology coverage, the platform makes it easy to incorporate and utilize custom metrics.

What can you do with custom metrics in the IBM Instana platform?

There are many benefits to bringing your custom metrics into the IBM Instana platform. To begin with, every captured custom metric is automatically available in the IBM Instana UI, giving you a unified place to view all your data. Custom metrics are given the same importance as any other metric within the IBM Instana solution. This method means that custom metrics can be used to create custom rules definitions for alerting purposes. They show up in the appropriate dashboards depending on the used technology or framework and have the same data retention as any other metric in the IBM Instana platform. Additionally, custom metrics can be used as a metric source in Grafana dashboards.

IBM is continually adding support for new sensors to the platform but, with the abundance of functionality associated with custom metric support, there’s no need to wait to bring in the additional metrics you want now. Examples of custom metrics can be viewed with the platform’s support of Dropwizard, StatsD and Micrometer.

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To see how the 100+ sensors or custom metrics in the IBM Instana platform can be utilized in your environment, set up a free trial today.