Since traditional APM and monitoring tools were not designed for dynamic applications, a new set of open-source technologies emerged to help development teams manually setup their own monitoring through manual coding. Whether providing performance metrics, tracing paths of an application, or exposing other details of code, these open-source monitoring tool create their own sets of challenges when it comes to production performance monitoring. 

RELATED CONTENT: Leveraging automated APM to accelerate CI/CD

To manually monitor the performance of an application, engineers must do the following:

  • Write data collectors manually
  • Manually code tracing to track distributed requests
  • Configure a data repository manually
  • Identify and designate dependencies manually (usually through reverse engineering)
  • Manually select data to correlate
  • Build dashboards to visualize correlation manually
  • Configure alerting rules and thresholds manually

The biggest problem is that the people performing these tasks are usually the highest skilled (and highest paid) technicians and engineers in our company.

In short, while open source tools imply simplified performance management, there are too many manual tasks, resulting in deployment slow-downs, cost increases and additional manpower requirements. And that’s before you look at the opportunity cost of your precious developers writing monitoring code instead of business application code.

Why waste your developer resources when there is a ready-made solution available? Instana, the automatic performance management solution born in the age of microservices, cloud computing, and containers, can enable you to truly deliver on the promise of CI/CD. Designed specifically to manage the performance of dynamic, CI/CD driven application environments, Instana leverages artificial intelligence and automation to deliver comprehensive, actionable insight with no manual effort. 

Regardless of your IT team size, automation is critical for an effective performance management strategy so that you can achieve high-speed delivery of new business services.  

 

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