Using Instana

Instana provides a single platform for using across the entire organization. Following are the functions of Instana:

  • Business monitoring

    Business monitoring provides monitoring of business processes. Business monitoring is an add-on feature of IBM® Instana Observability (Instana), which is available for Instana SaaS.

  • Monitoring mobile applications

    Instana supports monitoring of mobile application by analyzing actual URL request times, which provides insights into the application experience, and deep visibility into application call paths.

  • Monitor websites

    Instana supports website monitoring by analyzing actual browser request times and route loading times. Website monitoring provides you with insights into the web browsing experience, and deep visibility into application call paths.

  • Monitoring applications

    Instana provides Application Performance Management (APM) with services, endpoints, and application perspectives across them. Instana simplifies the monitoring of your business' service quality.

  • Monitoring serverless

    Instana helps monitor your serverless workloads.

  • Monitoring Kubernetes

    Instana provides you access to detailed Kubernetes information, such as:

    • Analyzing Kubernetes calls
    • Linking Kubernetes services and logical services
    • Using built-in or custom health rules for Kubernetes entities alert
    • Tracing workloads that are deployed on the service meshes
  • Monitoring Cloud Foundry and VMware® Tanzu (formerly known as Pivotal Cloud Foundry)

    Hosts and containers in a Cloud Foundry or VMware® Tanzu foundation are automatically discovered and displayed in the infrastructure map. You can filter all entities in a foundation.

  • Monitoring vSphere

    Instana helps you to monitor the metrics and configuration data on vSphere.

  • Monitor Infrastructure

    Instana always monitor the infrastructure and represent as it is. All issues and changes that are detected on the infrastructure are constantly related to any occurring issues and incidents on the application and user level. In this way, you can understand all parts that deliver the application.

  • Synthetic monitoring

    Synthetic monitoring also known as proactive monitoring. Synthetic monitoring helps to stimulate action on an application from different locations and continuously monitor at a specific interval for performance characteristics such as availability and response time.

  • Profile processes

    Instana AutoProfile™ is an automated and continuous production profiler, which helps you to continuously analyze code-level performance in production without negatively impacting production applications.

  • Managing events and alerts

    You can use Instana for the following events and alerts:

    • Managing built-in issues and incidents
    • Defining custom events
    • Configuring and manage alerts
    • Setting up alert channels
    • Scheduling maintenance windows
    • Configuring custom payload in alerts
  • Managing automation

    The Instana automation framework supports automating actions to diagnose and remediate events. You can use the action catalog to create actions or integrate with existing automation through a script, Webhook, or other third-party automation providers. You can associate actions with various Instana events and run the actions by using an action sensor on the Instana host agent.

  • Building custom dashboards

    Instana provides built-in dashboards to support common use-cases. In addition to the built-in dashboards, Instana supports custom dashboards to better satisfy your needs.

  • Service Level Objectives (SLO)

    Instana helps you to create and manage your Service Level Objectives (SLOs), which are necessary to analyze the Quality of Service (QoS) and reliability goals in concrete, measurable, and objective terms.

  • Filter with Dynamic Focus

    Instana provides Dynamic Focus, which is a search and filter function that searches all data contexts simultaneously.

  • Use the Dynamic Graph

    Instana provides Dynamic Graph, which is a model of your application that understands all the physical and logical dependencies of components such as Host, OS, JVM, Cassandra Node, MySQL, and so on. The graph also includes logical components such as traces, applications, services, clusters, and tablespaces.

In addition to these functions, Instana has six core capabilities to address the challenges that Dev+Ops teams face. For more information, see Core Capabilities.