What is IBM INSTANA? Recapping IBM’s latest innovation

What is IBM INSTANA?

If we asked, IBM delivered! At Instana, IBM focus on customer needs and creating an easy-to-use tool to help their DevOps and SRE teams reduce burnout and excel in their fields. IBM are excited to announce that in 2023 after careful consideration of your feedback and market insights.

IBM team introduced new product capabilities to simplify your team’s ability to observe, debug, remediate, and enhance your entire stack by seamlessly integrating observability practices and telemetry data into your software development lifecycle

IBM recap everything they launched in 2023, including awards, links to the latest update, and how to start each enhancement.

Beta turbointegration

The launch of IBM bi-directional integration with Turbonomic is significant to their customers. Average downtime costs $220K per hour, so we understand. IT professionals wonder, ‘How do you get the most from and for your applications?’ 32% of cloud spend is wasted. Integrated solutions are the answer.

• IBM innovative bi-directional integration with Turbonomic empowers your IT team to be proactive and preventative.
• The integration now links Turbonomic recommendations to Instana incidents, giving you more stack control.

Outstanding OpenTelemetry support

Complete visibility and understanding are needed for full-stack observability. For complete visibility, OpenTelemetry simplifies practices with common instrumentation, portable formats, and interoperable pipelines. OpenTelemetry instrumentation will underpin observability for future cloud and hybrid applications. Instana has deeply integrated OpenTelemetry with their core product and expanded coverage:

• Fully supported OTLP metrics, traces, and logs in Instana Agent and SaaS API.
• Premier mixed tracing using OpenTelemetry and Instana AutoTrace spans.
• OpenTelemetry metrics in Instana now support metric labels and histogram instruments.
• The Instana Agent enhances OpenTelemetry metrics and traces from any exporter, including collectors.
• IBM added semantic conventions for database servers and the open-source OpenTelemetry Database Data Collector to OpenTelemetry and Instana’s database server monitoring support.
• IBM contributed to the OpenTelemetry SDKs for JavaScript and PHP to improve entity linking from Instana and OpenTelemetry sources.
• An officially maintained fork of OpenTelemetry C++ SDK supports C++ tracing and metrics.

Synthetic monitoring

With synthetic monitoring, you can test your app beforehand. It detects and fixes performance issues before customer’s notice.

IBM know businesses want to run smoothly and quickly. IBM want to help you achieve that through observability and incident response automation, especially where we have differentiated capabilities. ​

• IBM have expanded their synthetic monitoring to notify you of API and transaction issues from anywhere.
• Additionally, IBM now support synthetic browser tests. The feature is open beta. With this update, your tests can mimic user interaction with your web application’s main workflows, allowing you to immediately identify and fix issues. Even novices can use this feature. Use Selenium IDE to code and import the script to Instana.

End-user monitoring

IBM end user monitoring (EUM) support now includes crash analysis, which is in open beta. Try it and give feedback.

Mobile developers will have one tool with all the data. All-stack mobile app traces to application call backend traces.

We can now automatically instrument websites!

This feature gives you automatic end-to-end visibility on your application’s performance from your user’s browser to the database query executed without changing the source code. This feature adds website hosting locations to your infrastructure map.

SAP visibility

SAP BTP cloud-native apps need real-time monitoring.

• Since expanding, Instana now monitors SAP BTP Kyma clusters.
• The same was done for their SAP ABAP sensor, which monitors platform and transaction metrics from the ABAP stack. Clients are encouraged to try and provide feedback on this beta.

SolMan performance metrics can be integrated into Instana to view and manage SAP and non-SAP metrics from a single pane. Forwarding SolMan alerts lets you identify IT issues across your entire landscape from one tool.

Taking intelligent actions

Users may have noticed a new automation icon in IBM Instana Observability’s main menu. IBM action framework lets you create new actions or reuse automation like Ansible and PagerDuty. Actions can then be associated with Instana events and become available to run during each event.

Differentiated cloud-native logging

In July 2023, IBM added logging monitoring with unbounded analytics for rich log analytics and Root Cause Analysis support.

• IBM logs in context-correlated to infrastructure components and distributed trace data where available-provide additional insights when analyzing incidents.
• Instana Logging provides high-fidelity log context views without manual tagging or instrumentation! When analyzing logs, Instana automatically correlates and displays it comprehensively.
• For cloud native environments, Instana Agent automatically collects Docker and contained runtime logs with the same context support.
• IBM also run OpenTelemtry log ingestion in a closed beta program to ingest logs from any source into Instana. This manual process will be automated in 2Q24 and 3Q24 for various technologies.

Business visibility

IBM introduced business monitoring last year, adding context to observability. The business context will add a 4th layer to end-to-end application performance, middleware health, and infrastructure APM observability.

• Instana can now automatically understand the business context of IT issues for customers who have automated their business executions with IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation, Camunda, and jBPM.
• Instana customers can extract critical business data from workflows to understand the true impact of IT issues in these environments.

IBM MQ, DB Marlin integrations

Through the partnership between DB Marlin and IBM Instana, businesses can now gain unprecedented insights into database performance.  IBM improve product integration to monitor and optimize database performance.

Terraform integration

IBM now support Terraform Provider Instana thanks to customer contributions.

The 2023 Awards CRN named IBM Instana a top partner-friendly product that launched and improved last year. Mike Mallo, Head of Instana Product Management, is thrilled to accept this award, “This achievement is a testament to our team’s hard work and dedication, focusing on our users’ experience for cloud-native workloads. We appreciate our partners’ support and look forward to innovation in the coming year. This honor inspires us to achieve greater success.”

Observability by numbers

IBM Instana, a cloud-native observability solution, automatically and continuously provides high-fidelity data one-second granularity and end-to-end traces with the context of logical and physical dependencies across mobile, web, applications, and infrastructure.

Get started

Want to try Instana’s observability innovations? Start a free trial today to spend less time debugging and more time building.

IBM love hearing from you too! Please submit your enhancement ideas on IBM Instana’s idea portal.

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