Applications are critical to the business. IT knows it, and the business knows it. Yet today, IT organizations lack visibility into the specific business processes those applications deliver and the context of how those processes are connected and impacted by the underlying container, cloud and infrastructure platforms they manage.

Our customers have told us that it is imperative for SRE teams to have the tools they need to detect, identify and act on business operations incidents before they impact end-users. Relying on siloed tools and tribal knowledge to fill this gap doesn’t work. It only forces teams into a highly reactive mode of operations, becoming aware of the business impact after it’s reported by the business team. 

The importance of business monitoring cannot be overstated. In today’s digital age, businesses are heavily reliant on their technology infrastructure. Any hiccups in the IT ecosystem can lead to significant damage to operations, resulting in lost time and revenue.

Applications are used by both IT and business teams. And with downtime costs of up to USD250K per hour on average, organizations need the visibility and context to understand the implications of any issue or incident so they can easily be prioritized based on importance. An SRE needs to see—and understand in context—how an application issue impacts the business processes it touches. 

That’s why we are so excited to announce IBM Instana Observability Business Monitoring, an automated solution designed to provide organizations with an end-to-end view of their business processes and applications. It enables teams to proactively monitor business KPIs without having to wait for reactive reports. This solution provides automatic and continuous detection of running processes executing in Business Automation (BA) tools. It captures every instance of the business process and the underlying IT requests on which it executes by using Instana’s 100% capture of trace data so that no business or IT data is missed.

IBM Instana Business Monitoring extends observability to business processes to provide real-time business context for IT. With Instana, an SRE can see automatically see what the business sees, adding critical context that bridges the gap between business and IT events. It ensures teams understand how specific business processes are connected to—and impacted by—their logical and physical dependencies across mobile, web, applications and infrastructure, making it easier to prioritize issues based on business impact. Instana’s unique approach makes it the only business-process-aware observability product in the market today. 

With Instana Business Monitoring, you can do the following:

• Automatically detect running business processes without requiring complex instrumentation.
• Capture 100% of trace data without sampling that could miss important context.
• Track business processes end-to-end through the IT stack.

With this announcement, IBM Instana now connects business and IT context by observing business processes in the context of their logical and physical dependencies across mobile, web, applications and infrastructure. Purpose-built for cloud-native, yet technology-agnostic, the platform automatically and continuously provides high-fidelity data—one-second granularity and unsampled end-to-end traces—a requirement for today’s modern, highly dynamic and business-critical applications.

With IBM, all teams, including Product Owners, Developers, DevOps, SRE, CloudOps and ITOps, get access to the data they need in the context that matters to them. With additional business context, these teams are now empowered to better prioritize their work to find and fix issues even faster.