Instana, the leader in APM solutions for containers and microservices, today at Dockercon Europe showcased the company’s next-generation Application Performance Management (APM) solution that automatically monitors and manages today’s dynamic microservice applications running in containers.

Designed from its inception to address the needs of monitoring today’s modern dynamic application environments, Instana is the first APM provider to apply both automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) across the DevOps lifecycle and fully automate all aspects of APM. Instana’s solution provides real-time visibility into the broad range of technologies that make up today’s microservices applications, including code-level visibility for nine different programming languages. The result is the most comprehensive understanding of the application technology stack for the least amount of effort so that DevOps can handle dynamic environments.

Automation + AI = The Next Generation in APM

Today’s digitally-transformed organizations have embraced Agile and DevOps, and are quickly creating new business applications using containers and microservice architectures. This adds tremendous complexity and dynamism to application and IT environments and demands an intelligent, next-generation APM solution to maintain the service quality these business critical apps require.

“As the only APM provider to embrace AI and automation for monitoring containerized and microservice applications, Instana uniquely addresses the next-generation monitoring and management needs of dynamic applications, regardless of size or complexity,” said Mirko Novakovic, Instana founder and CEO. “Instana can pinpoint the difference between ‘noisy’ IT events and those that have the potential to negatively impact service quality – and Instana goes beyond that by providing precise, AI-Powered root cause analysis.”

New Tools Needed

As DevOps teams collaborate to build and deploy complex, large, dynamic microservice applications, they need up-to-date visibility, a precise picture of the application’s structure and an immediate understanding of its health. Instana’s AI powered, real-time application performance monitoring and management solution addresses those needs providing:

  • Automatic, Continuous Discovery & Mapping: Zero configuration, continuous and automatic discovery of components, architecture and dependencies of the application’s full technical stack as well as the request patterns, or map, of the distributed services.
  • Precise, High Fidelity Visibility: Accurate data collection with metric data streaming at one-second granularity, and capturing every request through the application in a Trace which is then used as the source for AI training and as the basis for providing deep visibility into microservices applications.
  • Full Stack Application Data Model: An automatically populated model of the discovered application’s physical and logical dependencies empowering Instana to leverage the powerful capabilities of AI as the industry’s best troubleshooting, prediction and problem resolution solution.
  • Cloud, Container & Microservice Native: Instana was designed in the cloud era, for the cloud era and, as such, requires no configuration to align with the infrastructure, clouds, containers, orchestrators, middleware and languages to keep pace with today’s dynamic microservice applications.
  • Real-time AI-Driven Incident Prediction & Analysis: Leveraging real-time AI to detect and predict anomalies and identify constraints, Instana reduces the number of alerts to only the critical ones identifying incidents before they occur, thereby giving Ops teams a head start on solving problems.
  • AI-Powered Problem Resolution and Troubleshooting Assistance: The complexity of modern applications has made them far too complex to be effectively managed by humans. As a result, being able to leverage the power of AI to understand and predict the behavior and performance of modern applications and their microservices has become critical. By leveraging AI as part of the incident management process, it is now possible to identify root causes and address problems before the occur.

“Containers and immutable infrastructure make it extremely difficult for DevOps to determine the root cause of problem in dynamic microservice applications since the topology is always changing,” said Stephen Hendrick, research director for application development and management at Enterprise Management Associates. “Instana’s real-time mapping of application components and dependencies goes a long way to provide the visibility needed to evaluate and analyze today’s ever-changing apps.”

Immediate Customer and Partner Progress
Instana was founded by a team with decades of experience in the APM market that collectively shared a vision of what would be needed to manage the performance of today’s dynamic applications. Today, the accuracy of that vision is being realized through successful engagements with enterprise customers and through the creation of strategic partnerships with technology juggernauts. Since the introduction of their APM solution for Dynamic applications, the company has amassed significant traction with nearly 100 forward-thinking customers such as Edmunds.com, Sixt, iOFFICE and Audi.

“Using containers and microservices to build our applications allowed our organization to shift into another gear in development and deployment speed,” said Stephen Felisan, CIO, at Edmunds.com. “The Instana application monitoring tool could keep up with our new pace of application development and deliver the visibility our DevOps team needed into our application performance.”

Instana has also established partnerships with leading technology and cloud providers, including Container Orchestration companies such as Docker, IBM BlueMix Container Service, Red Hat OpenShift and Mesosphere, and with Cloud Service Providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).