IBM Instana is an Enterprise Observability solution that helps businesses unlock cloud-native performance. It is designed to automatically discover and map all services, infrastructure components, and their interdependencies.
Full Monitoring Automation. Instana automates the entire monitoring process – from discovery, installation, and configuration, to alerting, incident analysis, transaction tracing, and change detection.
In most cases, no manual intervention is required – the Instana agent automatically detects all available components and starts monitoring them. Instana, also integrates seamlessly with OpenTelemetry (OTel) where data can be forwarded to an Instana agent or backend via the OpenTelemetry Collector.
The environment is built with operational simplicity in mind. Wherever possible, automated routines handle repetitive tasks. After installing a single agent, Instana automatically deploys technology-specific sensors as needed.
Dynamic Graph – the Heart of Instana. At the core of Instana is its Dynamic Graph – an intelligent modeling engine that goes far beyond basic dependency mapping.
It continuously builds a multi-layered contextual model of the environment, including:
• application component relationships,
• detailed infrastructure insights,
• cluster, inter-module, and transaction-level dependencies.
Navigating through these dimensions is intuitive and seamless, enabling fast understanding and analysis of the current system state.
Beyond Metrics, Logs and Traces. Instana offers more than just metrics, logs and transaction tracing – it includes a robust event management system.
Anomalies are detected using both traditional threshold-based methods and machine learning algorithms that identify deviations from baseline behaviors.
Each anomaly generates an event, which is visible in the console and can be forwarded to external systems. Instana also supports incident correlation, automatically grouping related events based on system topology and dependency analysis.
The result is a single, consolidated incident report with root cause analysis and deep-linked details, dramatically reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR).
Deployment Model and Licensing. Instana APM can be deployed:
• fully on-premises in the client’s data center,
• or in a SaaS model – requiring only agents to be installed on managed servers.
The licensing model is simple and predictable – based solely on the number of (virtual) servers managed by Instana, ensuring easy cost estimation and scalability.
Instana has been recognized for IBM market-leading innovation in observability and AIOps, earning the prestigious CRN Product of the Year & G2 award for the best IT Infrastructure software award.