Application performance provider Instana has announced a new way for DevOps and IT Ops teams to manage and execute alerts. Instana SmartAlerts is an automated IT alert management system based on environmental and situational use cases.
According to the company, performance monitoring can become confusing when trying to figure out what you want to get alert about, how to define KPIs, if thresholds are too high, and looking at all the best practices. SmartAlerts is designed to automatically generate alert configurations with relevant KPIs and automatic threshold detection.
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“The complexity associated with containerized and microservice applications don’t just create observability issues, they also impact the ability to effectively manage alerts,” said Chris Farrell, technical director and APM Strategist at Instana. “Instana’s SmartAlerts provide pre-built configuration modules, called BluePrints, that inject context into alerting and curate critical alerting rules based on technological, process and operational situations.”
Users choose a blueprint for what they want to be alerted on, confirm the scope, and choose an alert channel.
“You may think of Blueprints as a prefabricated design for a house. While not entirely finalized, these plans allow for individualized customization to suit your taste. Don’t like those bathroom fixtures? Update them. Prefer to measure on the 99th percentile instead of the 90th? No problem. While the goal of SmartAlerts is to eliminate the difficulty in deriving reliable thresholds for performance metrics, we understand that our users may want to customize their alerting expectations,” Kevin Crawley, developer advocate at Instana, wrote in a blog post.
SmartAlerts is currently included in the company’s automated APM solution for microservices apps, and is generally available for users using end user monitoring with client-side apps. Instana plans to add SmartAlerts and Blueprints throughout the company’s entire ecosystem as well as updating new capabilities based on how users construct their own alerts.
