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Connections Powered by Instana in Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps 3.4

By Warren Zhou posted Thu July 07, 2022 12:14 PM

  

IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps enables customers to effectively identify critical incidents, determine potential appropriate remediation steps, and execute on those steps to decrease Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR). Users are able to keep a strong grasp on the true state of their IT, ensuring that all their services are consistently up and running.   

In 2021, IBM acquired a premier observability application performance monitoring tool – Instana. Since then, there have been significant development efforts to integrate Instana with other IBM offerings, including Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps. The enhancements made to Instana over the last two years have catalyzed its growth to being recognized as a Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Application Performance Monitoring and Observability! 

In the 3.3 release of IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps, there were significant enhancements to capabilities for ingesting topology, event, and metric data from Instana, for improved context of incidents. In version 3.4, IBM has enhanced the custom integration capabilities even further - users may now create custom event, topology, and metric data collectors using a new SDK. 

In this blog post, I will walk you through the additional capabilities that have been added to guide users to set up connections for the technologies used in their environments.  

 

Instana connector improvements 

Within the Data and Tool Connections module of the Automation Hub, the Instana connector now supports multiple concurrent connections as well as a collection of both historical and live metric data in the same connection. Users can select from a dynamically updating list of technologies (known as plugins in Instana) from which metric data can be collected. 

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Procedure 

On the home page of the Automation Hub, a user navigates to the Data and tool connections module. 

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Step 1

In the Data and tool connections module, the user navigates to the card which enables her to set up an Instana connection. 

 

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Step 2 

By default, users are provided with a static list of 30 technologies. Once a user configures a connection endpoint and API token, the backend sends a dynamically updated list of technologies for which metric data can be collected for the Instana instance specified in the completed fields.  

 

When the user specifies a target endpoint, the backend schema will automatically update. The schema polls the backend technologies and all the technologies from which users can collect metric data from will be displayed in the connection setup process. 

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Step 3 

The user can specify intervals for data collection, as well as the types of data to feed into each one of the data collectors. 

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A few minutes after specifying the connection, users will see an updated list of up to 180 available technologies they can select from.  

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Step 4 

Users may now also choose to collect data for a period of time so that there is a baseline quantity of data that AI algorithms train on before the system switches to learning from live data. This addresses the concerns that teams may have on bridging the gap between historical and live data.  

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Once the connection has been set up, the user can view that the connection is successfully up and running in the Data and tool connections module. Alongside the other connections, the system is now enriched with Instana data to provide the user with a holistic perspective of the performance of their system.  

 

Learn more about all the new capabilities Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps 3.4 through IBM documentation. 

 

You can read more about creating Instana connections here.  

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