With automation in mind, Leaf Group decided to make a shift to containers.
During the transition from traditional to containerized workloads, the TechOps team discovered that their legacy Application Performance Management (APM) solution did not provide the level of automation and visibility required to tackle the complexity that containers, microservices and Kubernetes introduce. “The support for containers was nonexistent,” explains Sengol. “We basically had to translate how they viewed a container as if it was a server, and that did not translate well.”
Seeking a new solution that could automate monitoring and match the speed of the new, containerized CI/CD workflows, Leaf Group’s six development teams participated in a bakeoff between Instana and Datadog — with Instana emerging as the winner.
“We chose Instana for several reasons,” says Sengol. “It’s intuitive, automatically providing the visibility required for our containerized applications. It’s cost-effective, being one-third of the cost of our previous APM solution. And the support is second to none — the best I’ve ever seen.”
Today, Leaf Group utilizes Instana to automate distributed tracing and root cause analysis, and to track website speed, page load times, latency, and logs, all while making strides to scale the business through automation.