Introduction
In today's fast-paced digital landscape, applications are being modernized by transforming them into microservices and cloud-native applications along with having traditional on-prem business critical services.
This hybrid composite landscape requires a modern observability tool that can efficiently observe the various components and services. It will provide automated contextualization of relevant data, issue detection, faster root-cause analysis and ability to resolve them through automated remediation. Without a single observability tool, businesses will be operating blindly with several point solutions and without correlation of data in this hybrid workflow.
For on-prem installation of this observability tool, selecting a suitable platform is important. The backend will collect and store a large amount of data from all the endpoints, filter and analyze them to obtain useful intelligence, and present them to the end users through a modern UI and APIs. This requires a high performing, stable, scalable, and secure platform.
IBM's Instana Observability combined with robust Linux on IBM Power Systems platform provides this winning combination - a modern observability tool running on a platform that is trusted by world's largest companies to run their business-critical applications - to ensure your applications are running smoothly and efficiently.
Why Linux on IBM Power Systems?
IBM Power Systems are renowned for their reliability, scalability, security, performance, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
Linux on IBM Power Systems is an ideal platform for application modernization where both traditional enterprise applications running on AIX, IBM i or Linux virtual machines can run alongside modern containerized workloads on IBM OpenShift.
With Linux on IBM Power Systems, you get:
- High Performance: Leverage Power core processors that works on reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architecture. This uses a smaller set of simple instructions to decode and execute quickly. Each instruction takes roughly the same amount of time to execute, and the processor can execute one instruction per computational unit in each clock cycle. This leads to faster processing for the most demanding workloads due to simpler circuit design, easier compiler optimization, uniform instruction format, and efficient use of general-purpose registers. Additionally, the high operational efficiency is achieved by optimizing the CPU usage through shared processor pools without sacrificing application performance.
- Scalability: Seamlessly scale your applications to meet growing business demands. Demand spikes can be managed with IBM PowerVM hypervisor on-demand CPU capacity for IBM Power compute and memory.
- Security: Benefit from industry-leading security features that protect your data and applications. With IBM Power10's hardware-accelerated transparent memory encryption, quantum-safe cryptography and fully homomorphic encryption, it protects data and provides comprehensive end-to-end security at every layer of the stack.
- Cost Efficiency: Optimize your IT investments with a platform designed for efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Fewer IBM Power servers run an equivalent set of applications at comparable throughput levels than on competing platforms with a 55% lower 3-year TCO.
- Optimized for containerized workloads: Using RedHat OpenShift Container is the industry's leading enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform that can run anywhere. It is designed to improve developer productivity and promote innovation. At the same time allows IT administrators to observe, operate and manage the platform and infrastructure efficiently.
Instana for Superior Observability
As teams increasingly shift to a hybrid IT model, the need for consistent management, observability, and automation becomes very important. Modern applications using DevOps calls for fast application cycles with frequent updates where both development and operations team need a single tool to observe the workloads for a common understanding of their applications behavior. Instana provides this capability and is a key tool in providing support for the DevOps team through:
- Automatic Discovery and Monitoring: Instana automatically discovers and maps all services, applications, and infrastructure components, ensuring comprehensive coverage and visibility.
- Contextualized Tracing: Provides full end-to-end tracing of requests across your entire system, enabling deep insights into application performance and dependencies.
- Dynamic Thresholds and Alerting: Utilizes machine learning to set dynamic thresholds and generate intelligent alerts, reducing false positives and ensuring timely issue detection.
- Application Perspectives: Offers customizable views tailored to specific applications or services, allowing for focused monitoring and management.
- Real-Time Analytics: Delivers instant analytics and insights, helping teams understand performance trends and quickly identify root causes of issues.
- Infrastructure Monitoring: Extends beyond applications to provide detailed metrics and health information for all infrastructure components, including servers, containers, and networks.
- Custom Dashboards: Create and customize dashboards to meet specific business and technical requirements, facilitating better decision-making and communication.
- Change tracking: Instana can track changes in application versions and configuration and show timeline markers for easier diagnosis of any behavior changes.
Instana Self-Hosted and IBM Power
Instana's Custom Self-hosted (backend engine) can now be executed on IBM Power. It is installed as a modern containerized application on RedHat's OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) running on Linux on IBM Power. This realizes the full potential of advantages described above and also provides:
- Data Residency: All the observability data (Metrics, Events, Logs, Traces) can now be stored locally on IBM Power platform. This enables secure storage that is critical for security-critical businesses like banking, insurance, health, defense, government agencies, etc.
- Efficient administration: IBM Power infrastructure administrators can now manage Instana from within their domain of expertise without having to host it in a different platform. They can optimize the infrastructure allocation efficiently and plan for scalability of future workloads.
- Air-gapped installation: Security critical industries can choose air-gapped installation of Instana Self-hosted in order to not expose the observability data to external world through public Internet.
- Scalability: Instana's backend pods can be scaled easily using OCP based on the number of entities that are monitored. As number of workload containers scale, so too can Instana's containers providing an elastic scalable solution.
Deployment and Configuration
Deploying Instana on OCP on IBM Power Systems straightforward. Follow these steps:
Preparation: Ensure your IBM Power System is running a supported Linux/OCP distribution and meets the hardware requirements for Instana. This depends on the size of your IT landscape like number of entities to be monitor, workload throughput size, number of logs, etc.
Installation & Configuration: This has 4 stages: (i) storage class configuration (ii) Configuration of Datastore (iii) Configuration of core and unit component of backend (iv) creating route for UI access. Details available in the link below:
Instana Documentation
Deployment and validation Blog
Validation: Verify the installation and configuration by checking the Instana dashboard for your system's metrics and performance data. Instana Agent needs to be installed on the system to be monitored.
Use Cases
Enterprise Applications: Monitor large-scale enterprise applications, ensuring optimal performance and availability. These can be hybrid applications, cloud-native applications or traditional applications undergoing transformation to cloud-native.
ecommerce Platforms: Gain real-time insights into transaction performance, user experience, and backend operations.
Financial Services: Ensure high availability and performance of critical financial applications, with stringent monitoring and alerting.
IBM Middleware: Large number of businesses use IBM systems like MQ, ACE, WebSphere, Liberty, etc. for their critical business workflows. Instana can provide complete visibility into these middleware components for their efficient observability.
Enterprise Applications: IBM Power systems are optimized to run SAP S/4 HANA applications that can be monitored using Instana.
Conclusion
Combining Instana with Linux on IBM Power Systems provides a powerful solution for comprehensive observability and performance management. This integration ensures your applications are always running at their best, delivering exceptional value to your business. Embrace this synergy to enhance your IT infrastructure's performance, security, and efficiency.
Nimesh Bhatia (nbhatia@ibm.com )
Program Director, Instana Self-Hosted
Sridhar Venkatesh ( svenkatesh@us.ibm.com )
Product Manager, Instana Enterprise Applications