Instana’s Application Management solution provides automatic APM and Application Infrastructure monitoring for dynamic application environments with these key capabilities:

• Continuous, automatic discovery of application and infrastructure changes
• Automatic, no-restart, code instrumentation of programming languages like Java, .NET based ones, Python, PHP and others by Instana AutoTrace
• Reuse of application traces created using Jaeger / OpenTracing, Zipkin and others
• Automatic failure discovery and thresholds for monitored services
• Visualization of Service dependency maps
• Tracing of EVERY user requests across ALL systems
• Application and service quality monitoring

With continuous discovery, Instana automatically discovers all your physical or virtual hosts, containers, and service orchestrators. Afterwards it constantly analyzes the infrastructure for changes, like started and stopped containers, physical or virtual hosts. Therefore any environment change is automatically discovered, recorded, and correlated to performance and health metrics.

By utilizing automatic inspection of the running technology stack, Instana understands the used programming languages, frameworks, (database) connectors and others.

After detection Instana adds technology specific sensors to the running process and starts monitoring the application’s performance and health instantly. No restarts required.

Instana AutoTrace makes Distributed Tracing a zero-effort experience, by automatically instrumenting technology specific sensors into the running applications.

These sensors collect information about the performance and health of your services, and gather relationship data for every request, such as service dependencies. Data collection and analysis of the applications and infrastructure by Instana AutoTrace is fully automated and provides an instant monitoring experience without the need to manually configure KPIs or alerting rules.

The Distributed Traces generated by Instana AutoTrace provide the user with a quick and easy way to understand a request’s flow through multiple systems and to resolve any service incidents. Detailed information about service dependencies, stack traces per service, and request timings of each individual services are offered by the flexible “Analyze Trace” dashboard in Instana without any manual configuration effort.

The Instana UI provides every person with an unprecedented set of possibilities to gather visibility into the infrastructure layout, dependencies or services and external systems, as well as performance and health information for each of the monitored environments.

For every discovered technology being used inside the infrastructure or application stack, Instana automatically creates a dashboard presenting important performance and health KPIs, such as error rate, throughput or latency.

Furthermore, Instana dashboards provide quick access to information like Service Dependency Maps, Request Flow Graphs or Traces analytics.

Based on the understanding provided by Instana’s Knowledge Graph, anomaly detection, root-cause analysis and incident creation is a fully automatic process.

By correlating information like infrastructure changes, redeployments, service dependencies and health or performance metrics Instana understands an application’s performance baseline and detects anomalies and creates incidents accordingly. No need to manage a custom performance ruleset for KPIs, Instana does that automatically.

To provide application or framework specific metrics, Instana natively understands additional metrics feeds, such as OpenTracing, Jaeger or Zipkin. Traces and performance metrics provided by those manual instrumentations are fully integrated into the Instana Knowledge Graph and offer additional contextual information, visualized inline with the automatically collected spans.

Correlating the knowledge of the infrastructure layout, automatically discovered service dependencies and performance or health metrics, Instana provides a much deeper visibility into highly distributed and dynamic application environments.