Proactively improve performance and efficiency with Instana automated resource optimization

Companies today rely on complex IT environments, both in terms of technologies and scale, to run their critical applications. These applications in these IT environments must always be available while managing an operational resources shortfall, the impact of which is expected to reach USD 8.4 million per organization by 2027¹. According to an IBM-commissioned study by Omdia, to overcome this shortfall, companies are automating IT operational processes as a top initiative in 2024-25.

IBM provides an innovative solution for companies to automate operational processes and deal with this challenge of optimizing application performance while reducing wastage. The integration of real time observability capabilities of IBM Instana with resource optimization capabilities of IBM Turbonomic enable companies to run their critical applications smoothly 24x7 in a cost-effective way, empowering their IT operations to proactively act before problems affect their customers and their baseline.

Announced at IBM TechXchange Conference 2024, we are happy to share that this integration is now generally available. This integration proactively removes resource constraints, allowing users, such as SREs, DevOps and ITOps to take context-aware actions that maintain infrastructure health while also eliminating resource bottlenecks.

Consider a scenario where you notice a sudden latency spike in your application summary page. This is where the integrated solution shines:

• Instana now displays recommended actions from Turbonomic, complete with detailed impact assessments.
• A user can execute these actions directly from the Instana interface, eliminating the need to switch between multiple products. The action request is executed in the Instana UI, and then actual execution is performed by Turbonomic.
• Executed Turbonomic actions along with how it impacted the performance of the applications, are viewable within Instana, providing a unified operational view.

This integration offers several key benefits:

By combining infrastructure and service maps with real-time performance metrics and log data, you gain a deeper insight into application and resource dependencies. Avoid over-allocation of resources by executing efficiency optimization actions in context of an application.

Monitor applications and execute resource decisions from a single, contextual interface, significantly improving application performance management and reducing performance risk profile.

The solution continuously runs your environment in a performant and cost-effective manner, leveraging insights and automation. The integration between Instana and Turbonomic provides the application SRE with infrastructure management awareness, allowing for the proactive maintenance of application health, driving reduced time between failures and reducing the time to resolve an incident. By bridging the gap between observability and resource management, this integrated solution empowers you to maintain optimal application performance while efficiently managing infrastructure resources.

The integration between Instana and Turbonomic is bi-directional, enabling the exchange of contextual data. Turbonomic uses the Instana REST API to collect information about the environment that Instana is observing such as applications, services, endpoints, virtual machines (VMs), containers, Java VMs, database servers, Kubernetes entities—for example, namespaces, deployments, StatefulSets, and others. The Turbonomic Instana probe is the component that uses the Instana API (Instana API token must be provided).  The Turbonomic kubeturbo probe is also required for Turbonomic to correlate the discovered Instana application resources to the Kubernetes infrastructure.

Instana uses the Turbonomic REST API to collect actions related to the environment that Instana is observing. The Instana Turbonomic sensor is the component that uses the Turbonomic API (Turbonomic API token must be provided). Instana collects and stores actions that Turbonomic has executed and actions that Turbonomic currently recommends.

Even though Turbonomic will not create actions for Instana applications, services, or endpoints, it must discover Instana applications so that it can obtain the infrastructure supporting the applications, and then, based on its analysis, create actions for them.

Today, integrating Turbonomic into Instana helps ensure applications are dynamically resourced to meet the desired performance needs without wasting resources. As announced last week at AWS re:Invent, our IBM team is building new capabilities like Instana GenAI Observability for AWS Bedrock, and these capabilities get enhanced with the in-context resource optimization for LLMs.

To see firsthand how Instana and Turbonomic together can redefine the operational performance and efficiency for your company, sign up for a demo today!

¹IDC Market Analysis Perspective: Worldwide Virtual Client Computing, 2024. #US52562724