Instana announces new capabilities

Instana announced new capabilities that make it the only application management solution that can jump right into a log analysis tool with all context of the application and component under investigation.

“IT teams responsible for deploying and maintaining today’s mission critical applications must react quickly, especially when attacking service issues,” said Pete Abrams, Instana co-founder and COO. “it’s important to have tools that work together to optimize troubleshooting. Instana’s ability to kick off a log analysis solution, with a visualization of the exact logs needed for examination significantly reduces the time it takes to actually solve problems.”

The first log analysis tools for which Instana is rolling out its one-click integration are Splunk and Humio. The interaction is handled via built-in buttons in the Instana GUI on key component dashboards (such as Servers, Containers and Kubernetes). When the button is clicked, Instana starts up an instance of the log analysis tool, along with a pre-executed analysis filter into the exact logs of the application components and associated infrastructure needing examination. TIming is also synchronized, meaning users won’t have to search for the specific log or timeframe needed to solve problems.

“Log analysis is an important part of the troubleshooting process, especially when integrated with application performance management solutions like Instana. Humio’s unlimited plan enables users to log everything, giving them autonomy to correlate Instana metrics with relevant logs from their environment,” said Cinthia Portugal, vice president of marketing at Humio. “Humio’s one-click integration and simple query language makes it easy to get started. Our modern architecture runs real-time searches on millions of streaming events per second, and because Instana pulls the exact infrastructure logs associated with problem components, getting the root-cause analysis is fast and easy.”

Unlike traditional APM tools, Instana’s automated Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution discovers all application service components and application infrastructure, including Cloud infrastructure such as Azure, orchestration infrastructure like Kubernetes and Docker, application services and DevOps processes. Instana automatically deploys monitoring sensors for each part of the application technology stack and traces all application requests – without requiring any human configuration or even application restarts. The solution detects application and infrastructure changes in real-time, adjusting its own models and visualizing the changes and impacts to performance in seconds.