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IBM Instana 2022 - A Year to Remember!

By Mike Mallo posted Fri December 30, 2022 09:54 AM

  

Dear IBM Instana Family,

We’re just a few days away from embarking on a new year. And as we ring in 2023 with confetti, resolutions, and renewed aspirations, the IBM Instana team would like to graciously reflect on a year of wide-ranging product development, industry accolades, and newly formed partnerships.

As a team, we embraced the shifting development of the observability industry – mastering the challenges produced by rapid innovation – while expanding our breadth in the market. In fact, we’ve experienced year-over-year growth since our inception, and 2022 offered a beaming light of what is yet to come. Here’s a recap of some of the most memorable moments of 2022.

Real-Time Observability, Smart Alerting and Incident Remediation

In 2022, we crystalized our position as the leading real-time observability platform.

The key real-time observability attributes are:

  • Precise 1-second Telemetry
  • Comprehensive end-to-end traces for all application transactions (never sampled)
  • Sophisticated ad-hoc metric analytics across multi-dimensional metrics and time periods
  • AI/ML-driven preventative and alerting actions
  • Out-of-the-box Smart Alerts for Incident Management
  • Custom Service Level Objective dashboard widget
  • 3-Second Incident Notifications
  • Enterprise-ready Role Based Access Control model
  • Dynamic Graph bringing together all your logs, traces, and metrics

IBM Instana Product Features

Remediation within Instana using our Action Framework

Some customers already have external scripts or automations that they use to diagnose or fix problems. So how does an action framework within Instana help?

Taking action from within IBM Instana (manual or automatic) – by associating actions to events, people investigating can hit the ground running and see what actions have been used in the past to work around or fix similar issues. This can save time in determining next steps and even run actions directly on the agent that triggered the event.

Synthetic Monitoring

IBM Instana recently released an advanced feature called Synthetic Monitoring. Synthetic monitoring, also known as directed or proactive monitoring, provides an interactive simulation of end-user engagement that allows developers to test and experience the performance of an application.

Synthetic monitoring uses scripts for user interactions based on factors such as geographic location, network types, different devices, and more. This tactic provides insight into application uptime, system outages, or complications users may experience while using an interface. The program also remediates the incidents just seconds after detection.

Open Telemetry

IBM Instana supports hundreds of technologies, and the rich telemetry it collects is correlated utilizing semantic relationships that describe how the different entities in software infrastructure — like hosts, zones, containers, namespaces, clusters, and all the rest — fit with one another.

The collected information is available at the user’s fingertips, for example, via the Context Guide. Instana AutoTrace and OpenTelemetry support out-of-the-box W3C Trace Context, which is the foundation for end-to-end traces mixing spans (the building blocks of traces in both AutoTrace and OpenTelemetry) generated by the two different tracing systems into one trace.

Kubernetes and Container Runtime Logging

With traditional log aggregation tools, you are left to manually search and filter your logs, hoping to find the message that proves useful. Considering the volume of logs generated by modern architectures, this approach is hardly efficient.

By combining application and container logs from your Kubernetes pods with the context that IBM Instana already has about your applications, we can quickly surface meaningful log messages to aid in incident recovery.

IBM Instana on OpenShift

Whether its Kubernetes or OpenShift, Instana goes wherever you go. We are excited to announce full support for hosting Instana On-Premise on Red Hat OpenShift.

IBM Instana’s On-Premise observability backend empowers system administrators with the complete suite of features available in the Instana Observability Platform while also maintaining full data custody and avoiding potentially expensive data transmission. Instana already supports a seamless installation process in Kubernetes using helm. We can now offer a similar seamless experience for OpenShift.

IBM Platform Integrations

IBM Turbonomic

When integrated with IBM Turbonomic, IBM Instana’s real-time observability diagnoses points of congestion and performance issues and automates remedial actions that help prevent issues from escalating into incidents.

IBM Turbonomic application resource management (ARM) capabilities quickly identifies infrastructure resource utilization and initiates resource scale up, to alleviate performance degradation, or scale down to reduce cloud infrastructure cost. We recently featured a business use case for the integration of the two systems on our blog.

IBM Watson AIOps

IBM Instana provides rich incident event data for IBM Watson AIOps, which enables end-to-end solutions for correlating, analyzing, and responding to application and infrastructure events. IBM Watson AIOps enriches incident root-cause analysis performed by Instana with additional context. It incorporates data from structured and unstructured sources, including other events, tickets, chats, and runbooks to generate predictive actions or to automatically remediate incidents with procedures contained in IBM Watson AIOps runbooks.

IBM z/OS

Integrating a cloud-native observability tool like IBM Instana with a proficient mainframe infrastructure like IBM z/OS facilitates the rapid detection of an incident’s root cause while simultaneously evaluating the factors that are impacting operation.

More recently, the IBM Instana and IBM z/OS teams have released an update that contains a new component, Omegamon Data Provider, that gathers selected attributes directly from agents running on z/OS LPARs and streams them to an IBM Instana proxy agent. With both tracing and metric information available in a single dashboard, hybrid application issues that drive z/OS-based workloads provide visibility into the mainframe while isolating the source of the problem.

Partnerships and Integrations

Partnerships continue to offer broadened opportunities for development and new client acquisition. Amazon EKS Anywhere supports the migration of applications to various hosting environments – whether on-premise, in the cloud, or a hybrid of both. Connecting IBM Instana’s observability functionality with EKS Anywhere. IBM Instana also announced additional partnerships with AWS for AWS Compute Optimizer and Cost Optimizer.

Earlier this year, IBM Instana announced a partnership with Lightrun, which supports shift left observability for developers by delivering Instana metrics and traces directly to Developer’s IDEs.

IBM Instana’s partnership with DBmarlin provides extensive database insights during instances of slow database performances or SQL queries that complement and enhance Instana’s native observability capabilities.

As a part of IBM Instana’s remediation initiative, we announced a partnership with PagerDuty. PagerDuty enables developers, DevOps, IT operations and business leaders to prevent and resolve business-impacting incidents by providing real-time information for popular incident management platforms.

Sales & Outreach

Our product marketing and developer advocates ventured to multiple events in 2022, including DevelopOps, Current, KubeCon, and most recently AWS: reInvent. While there, they spoke during breakout sessions, fostered new industry connections, and showcased Instana’s product features.

IBM Instana’s sales and marketing teams continuously spearhead new initiatives that foster extended consumer lifetime value. Our technical support teams provide consistent and reliable service to our clients while offering direct feedback from them. In such cases, we can strategically evaluate IBM Instana’s performance and remain abreast with the changing expectations of our clients.

Awards and Recognition

Industry awards are always cherished as a means to provide a level of guidance for our platform and its acceptance. One of our most significant accomplishments was when IBM Instana was recognized in the Leader’s Quadrant of the  Gartner® 2022 Magic Quadrant™ for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability in July.

This exceptional classification ranks IBM Instana amongst the top performers in the industry and showcases our prestigious standard of innovative observability in cloud-native and microservices environments. Our accolades were earned because our product advancements are well-studied, thorough, and exceedingly useful for our clients andpartners.

IBM Instana also recently achieved leadership status in the Fall 2022 Application Performance Monitoring Grid Report by G2. This accomplishment is the 8th consecutive G2 leadership announcement. IBM Instana was featured in more than 66 G2 reports, earning a leadership status across 23 reports, ranging from APM, AIOps, Container Monitoring, and Log Analysis categories.

Our progress in 2022 underscored the aspirations of our founding members. May 2023 usher in continued strategic development, product innovation, and industry-changing standards. Cheers to a great year ahead of us.

Happy holidays and best wishes.

Sonja Bata, Head of Marketing
IBM Instana

Related Content:

Gartner:

G2:

z/OS:

Watson AIOps:

OpenTelemetry (OTel):

Synthetic Monitoring:

Smart Alerts:

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Comments

Fri January 06, 2023 07:14 AM

Thank you for summarising it so well. Appreciate.