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Shift-left testing with IBM Instana Observability infuses the CI/CD process with automation, context and actionable intelligence to help deliver better software faster 
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Illustration highlighting various elements of Instana’s shift-left testing dashboards

Shifting tests ahead, or to the left, in the software development lifecycle helps find defects faster, apply fixes more efficiently and release a higher quality product sooner. When it comes to shift-left software testing, the more sophisticated the test cases the better. Unfortunately, typical monitoring solutions can’t deliver the meaningful results teams need to optimize their applications in pre-production.

Shift-left testing with IBM® Instana® Observability provides real-time visibility into the performance and behavior of the application or system being tested to help software teams pinpoint and fix issues early in the development process. When employing a shift-left testing methodology, Instana helps improve the quality and reliability of the product, while reducing the time and effort required for testing.
What you can do
Immediately improve your testing with true observability Once installed, Instana's agent automatically detects all applications and infrastructure in your stack, saving time on manual setup and reducing the risk of overlooking crucial components. You can begin benchmarking and comparing all application components, nodes, containers and architectural components right away.
Know exactly which part of your environment is failing By automatically mapping dependencies between applications, services and infrastructure components, Instana gives you full visibility into how each element impacts everything else. Seeing upstream and downstream effects enable you to pinpoint the root cause of issues faster, limiting time spent on triage and issue resolution.
Enhance your testing with 1-second granularity The whole point of continuous testing is to verify the performance of applications every time they act. With Instana, a new infrastructure snapshot is captured every second, so it delivers a much more enhanced version of the same metrics gathered by legacy monitoring tools that rely on sampling.
Trace requests end-to-end with full context into issues Instana automatically and continuously traces every request through the entire system, allowing for the easy identification of problems like slow queries or inefficient code. By delivering full context around each trace, Instana gives you the information you need to triage issues faster throughout the software development process.
Set and track performance baselines

Instana provides performance baseline analysis that helps teams identify potential roadblocks and bottlenecks in application performance. No matter what testing strategies are used, this allows teams to identify potential problems before they become significant issues.
Improve collaboration among teams 

Instana integrates with your DevOps toolchain to provide continuous feedback loops that help testing and development teams detect and address issues before they are deployed to production. This leads to faster time to market, better software quality and higher customer satisfaction.
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E-book
Observability in Pre-Production Testing

Learn how enterprise observability driven by artificial intelligence (AI) can provide automated unscripted tests that help to ensure greater resilience for applications before they hit production. (459 KB)

300+ supported technologies

Instana integrates with other monitoring tools, such as log management and network monitoring tools like IBM® Turbonomic®, to provide a comprehensive view of application performance across the entire IT infrastructure with no plug-ins or application restarts.

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IBM Instana Observability gives everyone across the enterprise user-friendly access to the data they want with the context they need to deliver rapid issue prevention and remediation.

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