Instana Pipeline Feedback is an automatic analysis of application development and deployment pipeline events, correlated directly with application, infrastructure, and service performance data.

As DevOps teams shift more to a continuous deployment model, there is a significant increase in the amount of dynamism in production. More software is updated or added more frequently on more infrastructure. Therefore, it is essential to have end-to-end visibility of each release and their impact on application or infrastructure health. For example, without the context of when a release happened, it's challenging to understand whether a latency spike of a service indicates a problem, or is it the artifact of the deployment process. This information might indicate that the release led to a degradation in performance, which helps to decide on whether to roll back to a previous version or identify a specific problem to be resolved.

Instana Pipeline Feedback bridges the gap between your deployment pipeline and production observability. By automatically marking exactly when code changes happen right on your performance charts, it eliminates manual verification, speeds up troubleshooting, and gives your team the confidence to ship software faster and safer.

What is a Release in Instana?

In Instana, a Release is a defined moment in time of when a change occurred to code, infrastructure, when the architecture becomes generally available. Also, it can have an impact on the health or performance of the system. A Release Marker is an indicator in a time series chart when system changes become available to users. Because these changes often impact system health, Instana lets you customise the scope of a release marker so it only appears where it matters. You can scope release markers in four ways:

• Global: Shows up across your entire environment.

• Application Perspective: Displays only for a specific application view.

• Service: Displays for a specific service across all applications.

• Service within an Application Perspective: Isolates the marker to a specific service inside a single application.

Release Markers on Charts

As shown in the following screen capture of the application perspective page, a release marker displays as an annotation on every graph in your environment. This marker serves as a reference point to quickly spot, for example, regressions or improvements in the performance of their applications. In other words, when a deployment occurs, Instana places a visual Release Marker on every relevant metric graph. Hovering over the icon shows the user-defined name of the release and the exact time it happened.

As shown in the screen capture of the application perspective page, the release marker contains the following information:

• Name: The user-defined release name.
• Release time: The point in time when the release has happened.

To help ensure that markers are readable and don't overlap, we cluster several buckets together. All buckets of a cluster are being highlighted when hovering over the corresponding release icon. If a bucket has a high capacity, releases that happened during the bucket's time window are clustered. This is indicated by a vertical line.

Before and After Time Analysis

To correlate outliers and anomalies or shifts in a metric, Instana includes information of each release in various ways. For example, additional context is provided to judge whether a spike in a metric might be a deployment artifact. Thus, release markers can be used as a tool to compare the behavior of the system before and after the release.

Along with being shown in charts, Instana also offers different ways to navigate to recent releases; follow the current live release or scope the selected timeframe to the timeframe around the deployment of the release. Each time a new global release is created, you are notified, and this notification enables you to perform two optional actions, so you can interact with these releases in two ways:

• Follow release live: This enables the Live Mode, allowing you to watch the real-time impact of a new release across all your dashboards as it happens.

• Focus time to release: This changes the selected timeframe so that the new release is in view while the current window-size of the timeframe stays unchanged so that metrics before and after the releases are easily compared.

Instana's time picker lists the most recent releases, as shown in the following screen capture:

After selecting a release, the timeframe is adjusted so that the current window size stays unchanged, but to your temporal view, the release time is centered. This enables you to investigate its impacts concerning performance and system health. Please note that if you haven't created a release using the API, you might not see the Go to a Release section in your time picker.

Simple Setup and Integrations

You can easily create releases as part of your deployment process, by using either our Web REST API or our Instana pipeline feedback integration for Jenkins.

• The Releases API: Our Releases API provides endpoints to create, read, update, and delete a release. As an example, the following curl command can be used to create a new global release named My Global Release Marker at the given point in time (as UNIX timestamp in milliseconds):

For further configuration examples see the Configuration and API section. The used API Token requires the permission Configuration of releases.

• Native Integrations: Instana also offers a Jenkins plug-in to allow a smoother integration with your existing CI/CD tools. The plug-in and further information can be found on GitHub. See Pipeline Feedback Integrations to learn how to integrate it with your CI/CD pipeline.

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