IBM is pleased to announce that a new release of IBM Observability by Instana — version 1.0.209, for both on-premises and Software as a Service — is available as of September 28, 2021.

This release expands the coverage of the IBM Observability by Instana, an observability platform and automated Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution designed specifically for the challenges of managing microservices and cloud-native applications. This latest release delivers enhancements and additional coverage from what was delivered with version 1.0.203 for traditional IBM clients. This new release leverages prior investments in IBM middleware and brings visibility into the observability platform. 

Several features are released as Technology Preview, which gives users early views of the capabilities we intend to deliver in future releases. We include the Technology Preview capabilities and look forward to your feedback to make sure we are meeting your needs and addressing the challenges you need to tackle. 

Main themes driving content for IBM clients in this new release

Help Clients get more value: Features already in the Instana offering are now side-by-side with new features proposed to extend the monitoring capabilities supporting IBM-specific items. The following are some examples: 

• IBM Tivoli Monitoring V6 Integration (Technology Preview): This technology preview enables existing ITM V6 customers to integrate their existing monitoring with Instana. Customers are able to view their monitoring data simultaneously in both the ITM V6 UI and the Instana UI. The Integration of IBM Tivoli Monitoring V6 with Instana is accomplished by updating the ITM V6 or ITCAM V7 agents to communicate with both the IBM TEMS server and the new IBM Monitoring Instana Integration Service. The IBM Monitoring Instana Integration Service is the main portion of the technology preview. It transforms the monitoring data from the V6 agents and provides them to the Instana server via the ibm-apmproxy sensor. For more information click here. 
• Apache HTTPd Tracing (Technology Preview): Instana now supports tracing Apache HTTPd on xLinux 64. For more information, see the Apache HTTPd docs.
• IBM ACE Tracing (Technology Preview): Instana now supports tracing IBM ACE on xLinux 64. For more information, see the IBM ACE docs.
•  Sensor and Agent enhancements:
  •  IBM ACE Sensor:
    •  Added support of HTTPS protocol
    •  Added filter to exclude integration servers from monitoring
    •  More types of message flow are supported
    •  Added support of monitoring ACE server with administration security enabled
    •  Application name for each message flow can be displayed
    •  Added more built-in events
  • IBM MQ: 
    • Added six Channel metrics and two Queue metrics and summarized data by time selection in KPI value frame
    •  Added support for monitoring local queue managers
    •  IBM MQ Tracing:
      • Improved performance for tracing MQ messages
      • Added support for sending IBM MQ tracing data to the remote secured host agent endpoint
      • Added support for linking calls to IBM MQ to the infrastructure entity
      • Traces for messages on temporary queues and the default internal system queues for IBM App Connect Enterprise(ACE) are no longer generated
  • IBM i OS: 
    • Added new metrics (e.g., auxiliary storage pools, output queues, spool/print files and active jobs)
    • Added KPI (e.g., CPU utilisation (avg), active jobs, threads)
    • Rearrangement of UI components for better UX 
  • IBM Db2 on z/OS: IBM Db2 for z/OS support in Instana is proof of concept to showcase the IBM Db2 health, Snapshot data KPIs and basic metrics.
  • IBM WebSphere AS sensor: Add new metrics for J2C Modules, Object Pools and Transactions
  • IBM DataPower:
    • Report errors as agent monitoring issues
    • Fixed worklist changes in UI
  • IBM APM V8 Integration: Fixed several issues in the EBA that gets installed into APM V8 server. Refer to the documentation for download instructions to get and replace the file in the APM V8 server.

New metrics pipeline for unbounded analytics (beta): Version 1.0.209 starts a beta program for unbounded analytics. This includes features like custom dashboards for infrastructure metrics and a preview of the infra entity explore. Note that this feature is not yet supported for large production environments and the resource baseline of the Instana box is increased to 16 CPUs and 64 GB of RAM. Furthermore, there must be sufficient free storage space available on the metrics mount point. To be included in this program, contact your technical Instana support. 

Other features added in this release are:

• Sensor for Traefik reverse proxy and load balancerTraefik app is now available on the dashboard together with its metrics.
• Go:
  • A new instrumentation package github.com/instana/go-sensor/instrumentation/instahttprouter is released. This package provides instrumentation for HTTP servers that use the github.com/julienschmidt/httprouter router.
  • Added instrumentation instrumentation/instamux/v1.0.0 for github.com/gorilla/mux router.

These improvements and fixes are implemented: 

• The API for managing user invitations is moved from /api/settings/users/invitations to /api/settings/invitations. Older API endpoints will remain intact, but are now considered deprecated.
•  AWS Lambda Sensor: Report Lambda layers and environment variables.
•  Security improvement:
  • New requirements for password: Minimum 15 characters, including at least one special character, one number, one upper- and one lower-case letter
  • Users are now signed out after changing their password
• Custom host events: It is now possible to create a custom event based on the filesystem metrics and a mount point as a filesystem identifier
• Cloud Foundry: Added support for the Ubuntu Bionic
• Application monitoring: Some Kubernetes-related infrastructure tags are now available when configuring Application Perspectives and Custom Dashboards. They can also be used in Unbounded Analytics for Calls and Traces. The new tags are as follows:
  •  kubernetes.cluster.version
  •  kubernetes.namespace.labels
  •  kubernetes.node.label
• Unbounded analytics: Charts are now toggleable — if you want to focus on your results and do not need a chart, you can remove it and add it back again later
• API tokens: Adjusted the logic to show and copy API tokens to better support Safari.
• Fixed the issue that Kubernetes search fields for pod uid are missing; container name and pod name are added for the Containerd plugin

Additional features, improvements, and fixes were made to the enterprise observability platform and automated Application Performance Monitoring solution since the 203 release: 

• https://www.instana.com/docs/releases/notes/build_204/
• https://www.instana.com/docs/releases/notes/build_205/
• https://www.instana.com/docs/releases/notes/build_206/
• https://www.instana.com/docs/releases/notes/build_207/
• https://www.instana.com/docs/releases/notes/build_208/

Additional links

• IBM Observability by Instana APM
• Overview of the offering in IBM Documentation
• Instana documentation