Context Guide
The Context Guide visually represents Application Perspective services and their underlying infrastructure. Powered by Instana's Dynamic Graph, the Context Guide tracks all physical components of your infrastructure and links them to their logical counterparts. It automatically updates whenever changes occur to ensure you have accurate and current information.
Dynamic Graph
The Dynamic Graph is a core concept of the Context Guide. For more information, see Leveraging the Dynamic Graph.
Group infrastructure
Use the Stack drop-down to view the Dynamic Graph. The Stack lists the various Application Perspective services and their linked infrastructure. In the Context Guide, the Kubernetes tab lists resources such as Clusters, Deployments, and Pods. The Infrastructure tab lists physical infrastructure such as Hosts, Processes, Docker Containers, and Java virtual machines.
The Context Guide groups the infrastructure by the high-level type in which an item is logically expected to fall. For example, Clusters and Containers appear in distinct sections in the Context Guide. You can view your infrastructure in one place after you group items by their high-level types, which help you to quickly access components that are related to one another.
To view the context of a particular infrastructure component, you need to open the Context Guide Stack for a Kubernetes namespace. The cluster in which the namespace resides is listed as are the nodes on which are scheduled pods of deployments in this namespace.
Upstream or downstream information
You can click Upstream/Downstream to view and navigate to the dependencies of an Application, Service or Endpoint, Infrastructure entity, or Kubernetes entity.
You can use the Upstream information to identify the impacted services and applications when the current entity experiences issues such as high latency or errors. The Upstream tab displays services and application that are related to the current entity. Calls from upstream services that are not monitored by Instana are grouped under Not monitored by Instana.
You can use the Downstream information to find the root cause of what services and applications the current entity depends on that experience similar issues. The Downstream tab displays services and applications that are related to the current entity.
The Upstream and the Downstream information are always based on all calls of an application perspective despite its default or currently selected application scope.
