Tracing in Instana

Components in your environment could range from a few monolithic applications to thousands of microservices, with each component connected by application code that is continuously adapting to technical and business changes. Tracing helps you to understand the interaction between these components and the messages passed between them. Using our Dynamic Graph, we enhance each trace to provide you with data relating to each service, application, and the system architecture.

To best suit your needs, we provide the following tracing implementations.

Automatic instrumentation

Instana AutoTrace™ is a distributed tracing and service discovery technology powering Instana’s fully automatic, no-effort, and instant observability experience.

AutoTrace™ is supported automatically for the following technologies:

With minimum configuration, automatic instrumentation can be enabled for the following technologies:

Manual instrumentation

Instana SDKs

For the languages listed as follows, we provide tracing SDKs that allow you to add tracing data to those automatically collected by Instana. Additionally, the Trace Web SDK, which can be utilized over plain HTTP by any language and other systems:

The following SDKs are used over configuration of the Instana host agent:

OpenTelemetry

We provide support for ingesting OpenTelemetry data via the Instana host agent.

For more information on OpenTelemetry, see relevant documentation.

OpenTracing

We provide OpenTracing tracers for the following languages:

OpenCensus

OpenCensus is tracing and metrics API and implementation is available in several languages. Vendor-specific "exporters" allow you to use OpenCensus with formats different than the default one. We provide exporters compatible with Instana AutoTrace™ for the following languages:

Other tracers