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)
Micro Focus Diagnostics (discontinued)
Score 5.0 out of 10
N/A
Micro Focus Diagnostics was the analytics and issue diagnostics component of the Application Performance Management suite. It provided code-level visibility into transaction activity across applications and the network they are operating on. The product is no longer available for sale.
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.
I would say on 90% of our agent installs everything works without any modification. If the application however makes a large use of memory based cache and analysis that classes will need to be excluded from instrumentation or it will impact performance.
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
Agent level customization - For highly performant applications we can easily exclude instrumentation, yet still receive the benefit of historical tracking on common data points like CPU, Heap and GC cycles.
Support - In the 5+ years working with the product any HP solution engagements have been quick to provide a needed configuration solution.
Agent Diversity - Have used the product across 6+ differing middleware technologies comprising dozens of version (both middleware and java) combinations.
Agent installation - With its ability to support a silent type install, automating was a simple task.
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.
The product does offer a lot of functionality - This can lead to a cluttered user interface and does take some time to become comfortable and proficient in its use.
Data Volume - We have had some issues in balancing the desire to keep all data and consuming infrastructure storage.
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.
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.
While it has been several years since using BMC Patrol I like that HP doesn't require me to have a custom module added for every different type of product I would like to instrument.
