The three pillars of observability are: metrics, traces and logs. Instana automatically discovers and monitors components as they are deployed or scaled, capturing metrics with a 1 second resolution. All requests are traced end to end without any sampling. As part of the language runtime instrumentation, log messages at WARN or above are captured as part of the trace data. However there are numerous other sources for logs, message below the captured level and other components such as caches, data stores, proxies, etc. This is where a log management solution comes into play.

LogDNA is a log management solution with a similar ethos to Instana to provide functionality with zero or minimal configuration effort. Once the link to your LogDNA dashboard has been configured in Instana. A link appears on the Instana dashboard that drills down into LogDNA in context with the search criteria and date time range already set.