IBM Instana Observability Self-Hosted releases a new version – version  1.0.241 – today, February 14, 2022.

This latest release delivers enhancements and additional coverage from what was delivered with version 1.0.239. In this release, you can directly use Instana packages for installation and deployment.  For detailed instructions, see the Instructions.pdf file, which you can download from Passport Advantage. 

Main features now available to IBM clients in the new release

AutoTrace WebHook for Python replaces host agent based AutoTrace

The previous automatic installation of Python AutoTrace via the host agent mechanism is planned to be deprecated for increased stability and a future-proof solution. The preferred approach to monitor Python applications is the AutoTrace WebHook. However, this approach only works on Kubernetes/OpenShift. If your applications are not on Kubernetes, use the manual installation of Python AutoTrace.

LDAPs without trusting any Certificate Authority

A Trust any certificate authorities whilst using LDAPs checkbox is added to the LDAP Configuration wizard. By default, a self-signed certificate for the LDAP is expected, and therefore the Certificate Authority is not validated. The Certificate Authority validation can be turned on by unselecting the checkbox Trust any certificate authorities whilst using ldaps in the LDAP Configuration wizard.

For more information, see LDAP.

Sensor new features and improvements

Containerd Sensor

A GetContainerInfo button is added to the containerd dashboard to get the information of a specific container.

Instrumentation of Azure functions in Go

Added support to the instrumentation of Azure functions in Go. For more information, see Azure Functions Tracing for Go.

IBM DataPower Sensor

• Fixed the problem that the DataPower appliance down event is not triggered.

• Fixed the problem that the DataPower domain alert is not triggered.

IBM i Sensor

Custom events for message queues with specific message IDs and text are added based on the defined MessageQueue and MessageLibrary.

IBM MQ Sensor

Allowed Instana agent to be configured with user defined queues to read performance/channel/qmgr events, instead of the previously hard coded local queues like "SYSTEM.ADMIN.PERFM.EVENT", "SYSTEM.ADMIN.CHANNEL.EVENT", "SYSTEM.ADMIN.QMGR.EVENT".

IBM MQ Tracing

Fixed the problem of service name extraction when the MQ server name contains the character "-" .

IBM Power HMC Sensor

Introduced a new dashboard for the shared processor pool to display all the related metrics.

IBM WebSphere AS Sensor

• Previously, when you set PMI to the basic mode, the original PMI setting will be overridden. But now, you can set the enable_pmi field to false, and the original PMI setting will be kept.

• The metrics are collected from PMI of WebSphere server. The required PMI data collection is enabled by default. That means if the enable_pmi field is not set or set to true in the agent configuration file /etc/instana/configuration.yaml , the PMI will be enabled.

NGINX Tracing

Added the tracing support for NGINX 1.23.3 and NGINX Plus R28.

Oracle Sensor

Added the following new metrics:

• Active Session History

• Foreground Sessions

• List Of Queries Not Using Bind Variable In Code

• SQL Consuming More CPU

• Top CPU Consuming Sessions Last 10 Min

• Top CPU Queries Last 24 Hr

• Top Elapsed Time Queries

• Top Ten CPU Consuming Sessions

• Top Ten SQL With High IO Last 1 Hr

• Top Ten SQL With High IO Last 24 Hr

• Active Sessions

• Library Cache Hit Ratio

PHP Sensor

• The version 1.17.0 of the Instana PHP extension (included in PHP Sensor 1.1.75) adds support for PHP 8.1.

• Sunsetting support for PHP On 32 bit architectures

  The version 1.17.0 of the Instana PHP extension, which is the default in the latest PHP Sensor 1.1.75, no longer supports PHP on 32-bit CPU architectures. If PHP is run on a 32-bit architecture, you can stay on the version 1.16.8 of the Instana PHP extension by pinning the extension version by using the com.instana.plugin.php.tracing.pinExtensionVersion setting.

Prometheus Sensor

Prometheus service discovery is improved by using Prometheus Kubernetes annotations to discover Prometheus scrape endpoint and port.

Other improvements

Application Perspectives and Infrastructure dashboard performance

The loading time of Stack on Application Perspectives and Infrastructure dashboards is improved.

Splunk Alert Channel notifications

Added a fix for incidents and closed events notifications in Splunk Alert Channel.

Various dashboards

Incorrect counts on some KPIs are now fixed for Instana Agent, Mule ESB, Etcd, Cassandra and HAProxy dashboards.

For additional features, improvements, and fixes made to the enterprise observability platform and automated Application Performance Monitoring solution, see the release notes at https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/instana-observability/current?topic=notes-self-hosted-premises. 

For more Information

• IBM Instana Observability Self-Hosted

• Overview of the offering in IBM Documentation

• Instana documentation

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