Instana U

Authored by: Ajuma Bella Salifu

Are you a business owner trying to monitor and alert on your business metrics? Are you trying to reduce the time it takes to detect revenue-impacting issues? 

Instana website monitoring, also known as end-user or real-user monitoring, tracks metrics and events on your websites. Real-time information about HTTP calls, errors, and other events are collected as they are happening within your browsers.

Instana’s custom events identify activities that are happening more or less frequently than they should be.

This feature analyzes uncaught errors in your application and tracks additional business performance metrics. Previously you could trigger custom events and view these events on the dashboard but could not alert them.

As promised, Instana is continuously analyzing our customers growing needs and working to meet your observability goals. We love to go the extra mile, and with that in mind, Instana has added a new feature to your custom event dashboard that brings the best automated alerting to your fingertip.  We now provide you with the ability to set alerts and receive alerts on custom events based on daily or weekly seasonality. 

Benefits of Leveraging Smart Alerts on Custom Event 

• Flexible definition of scope–  Instana’s flexible definition of alert scope has an unlimited combination of dimensions when scoping alerts.
• Detecting seasonality– Business KPIs require context as they are human-dependent. In most cases, they are heavily influenced by human behavior, which is seasonal. A great example is when you want to alert on spikes in logins. Defining this can be hard, as it may differ depending on the country, hours of the day, holidays, your operating system, and events. Since driving business growth is the whole purpose of websites and applications, detecting any sudden variations in the occurrence of key business events is crucial, especially when these business events do not result in calls to the backend (observed by Instana).
• Out-of-the-box blueprints for alerting on custom events – We recognized that there is a growing need within the teams to implement a more simplified approach that could cater to both advanced and junior level members of your team. Smart Alert has a feature called Simple-Mode with sensible defaults that business owners (without deep technical know-how) can use to set up alerts on custom events on their own blueprints.
• Monitor 100% of the data in real-time – Significant anomalies can occur in various metrics and “business depths.” You don’t just monitor top-line revenue. Revenues should be monitored per product, country, and technology. It is also important to monitor technology + country, product + technology and product + technology + country combined and in real-time across multiple layers of business data, to achieve a watertight solution. Instant alerting on KPIs relevant to you allows you to correlate between disparate anomalies and alert you on incidents in real-time and with context. This provides complete data coverage.

Let’s Explore How to Set an Alert on Custom Event for a specific KPI

Pick a KPI that’s relevant to your business. For this example we want to be notified of a sudden increase in or drop in payment is declined on an e-commerce website.

Choose the KPI – Payment Declined.

Choose a scope – This step is optional but for this example we only want alerts from the US stores.

Pick an alert channel

So now that you have a better understanding of one of the capabilities of Smart-Alert being added to the custom event, you can see how easy it is to use this new feature to monitor business metrics. Watch out for our next blog where we discuss How to Detect Complex Issues with Smart-Alert.

End the Guessing Game, Try Smart Alert on Your Custom Event Today!

Smart Alerts are now generally available for our customers using EUM (End User Monitoring) with their client-side applications. If you are monitoring a website, you can get started by clicking on the “Add Alert” button on your performance dashboard as illustrated above. If you are new and want to try it out you can get started with – Play with Instana or sign up for a free, 14-day trial.

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