Instana, an IBM company since the December 2020 acquisition, provides APM services for SOA, microservices, containerized applications and Kubernetes, and cloud native applications, as well as discovery and monitoring for IT assets.
$75
per month per Managed Virtual Server (MVS)
ignio AIOps
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
ignio AIOps, from Digitate in Santa Clara, is a solution designed to improve business agility by creating a unified view of the IT estate, connecting business functions to applications and infrastructure. This is combined with behavior profile of systems and applications that is continuously learnt using this blueprint. ignio aims to improve the transparency of complex Enterprise IT landscapes.
With enterprise IT assets in a multitude of ecosystems, cloud infrastructures and sometimes still left stuck in a legacy on prem architecture, IBM Instana makes it easy to get the right data to drive development and / or DevSecOps processes with tangible input from the target environment itself.
It's good for issue resolution, user access request automation, standard report generation, health checks, executing self-healing as configured in the attributes. Currently not good at real-time monitoring to trigger an action. Health checks have to be on a scheduled basis.
Can monitor application(s) and system(s) with very large throughput of transactions by the second ( it gets everything !!!)
Provide strong drill down for your applications and will tell you where the points of failure of an application's is ( servers , network , Databases , etc you name it )
Very easy to set up and have it up and running when using the SaaS solution. There's an on premise solution which works just as well but requires more effort and preparation from an infrastructure point of view for your teams to implement.
Continuously improve their features and their agents auto-update and keep up. All while not interfering with your applications.
Let's you create your own dashboards and visualizations that can be tailored for different kind of users with the data collected.
Create your own events and smart alerts so you can know on the spot if something is happening or is likely to happen that needs addressing on your applications / systems
It's very difficult to create custom dashboards, only a handful of scenarios can be visualized to dashboards.
Extracting information from Instana to further analysis into excel for example is something that can be improved. Using an API to get data is very limiting.
Open telemetry features which allow to send application data to Instana is not working as documented.
There is a lot more the desktop tool can do. For example, we need to apply an upgrade to get the tool to talk to our infrastructure while employees are working from home. The tool was initially installed with the assumption that the desktops would be in UserLand. Instead after COVID-19 the desktop/laptops have been used for over a year on people's home networks. As of right now, we have to sync when the devices are connected to VPN. Moving forward with the upgrade, we will be getting this data over TLS when they are connected to the untrusted networks.
The concept of ignio AlOps requires OCM efforts within most operational teams. This isn't necessarily the fault of the tool itself, but when implementing ignio, or any AIOps tool, the team will get a lot of pushback as an outside team is centralizing the operational improvements. The tool should have a centralized intake process that will allow the collection, ranking, and management of automation opportunities. ignio AlOps should then simulate the proposed efficiencies from implementing something within the backlog. Right now a lot of local teams are having a hard time getting on the same page as the enterprise teams, and a common methodology for prioritizing (even if overly simplistic) would go a long way to enterprise planning.
These tools are very new and things get added to them all the time. There should be a way for the product's stakeholders and process owners to understand the additional value ignio AlOps is gaining over time.
Instana has been able to fulfill our all requirement and provide out of box solution for multiple component like AWS RDS Monitoring and real time alerting setup on basis of that. it is also easy to integrate with other open-source alerting and monitoring tools which makes it easier to incorporate into our solutions
IBM Instana totally alters our monitoring approach since it increases the stability of the system and simplifies the process of problem solving. And since it helps to lower the degree of alert exhaustion that we experience, it is a total game changer for us.
ignio AIOps version upgrades were a heavy lift. Having to learn a new language versus an industry standard language took time. More consideration on overall internal long-term support needs to be determined.
We have built a healthy relationship with the vendor support team throughout the implementation phase, all incidents raised were resolved within the SLA without a fail
I am happy with the way team has implemented and shared the product for our organization. However, would like to see it get extended to the other line of business too.
As a DevOps engineer, I've explored various Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools, including New Relic for real-time insights, AppDynamics for code-level visibility, Dynatrace for AI-driven monitoring, Datadog for comprehensive observability, Splunk for log management, Stackify Retrace for error tracking, and Raygun for crash reporting. Each tool offers distinct features, and the choice depends on specific use cases, technology stacks, and organizational needs. Thorough evaluations, considering factors like ease of use, integration capabilities, and scalability, help in selecting the most suitable APM solution for effective application monitoring in a DevOps environment.
