Personas and use cases
Learn about the personas in Instana.
For Instana, four personas are defined: Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), DevOps engineer，IT administrator, and developer. Each persona can use Instana to complete their tasks more efficiently and easily.
You can see the persona-specific quick start guides that focus on the tasks and workflows most relevant to each role.
If you are not sure which guide to choose, or if you want to explore Instana before you select a role-specific path, start with the quick start guide for all users .
SRE
SREs are responsible for maintaining application availability, reliability, and performance from the user perspective. They need to:
- Maintain healthy pipelines and simplify deployment processes
- Monitor availability and status for platforms and managed services
- Detect problems before they affect customers, and prevent recurring issues through manual or automated runbooks
- Collaborate with developers by providing access to relevant logs, events, and performance metrics
Key tasks:
- Create application perspectives
- Set up service level objectives (SLOs)
- Configure synthetic monitoring
- Set up Smart Alerts
- Create team dashboards
Instana helps SREs by providing a unified interface for monitoring all infrastructure, SLOs for measuring service performance, root cause analysis tools, synthetic monitoring to prevent high-impact incidents, and automated incident detection.
To get started with Instana as an SRE, see the SRE quick start guide.
DevOps engineer
DevOps engineers integrate monitoring into CI/CD pipelines and automate operations so that applications can meet stability and security goals. They need to:
- Keep every system running at maximum reliability
- Predict and mitigate incidents before they impact users
- Resolve incidents independently without developer intervention
- Fulfill customer service level agreements (SLAs) with SLOs covering latency, traffic, errors, and saturation
Key tasks:
- Monitor services after deployment
- Set up Smart Alerts for anomaly detection
- Configure automated incident response
- Analyze unsampled data with Unbounded analytics
- Track deployments with pipeline feedback
Instana helps DevOps engineers by providing synthetic monitoring for incident prediction, automated Smart Alerts for anomaly detection, capabilities for root cause analysis, and Unbounded analytics for insights from unsampled high-cardinality data. Instana also supports automated incident response through configurable actions, Git-based configuration management, Terraform integrations, and Ansible playbook execution for remediation.
To get started with Instana as a DevOps engineer, see the DevOps quick start guide.
IT administrator
IT administrators are responsible for setting up, configuring, and maintaining the performance of IT infrastructure. They need to:
- Set up and configure infrastructure and software components
- Perform capacity planning and optimization
- Monitor availability and status for on-premises IT infrastructure
- Monitor alerts and incidents, analyze business impact, and respond promptly
- Perform root cause analysis and communicate findings to developers or SREs
- Respond to and recover from outages or performance degradations and prevent high-impact incidents from recurring
Key tasks:
- Install Instana backend (self-hosted) or access SaaS tenant
- Install agents on hosts and clusters
- Configure monitoring
- Set up user access and permissions
- Configure alert channels
Instana helps IT administrators by providing visibility into physical and logical dependencies through the Dynamic Graph and Context Guide. It supports SLOs for analyzing service quality, comprehensive infrastructure monitoring for capacity optimization, infrastructure comparison tools for quickly isolating issues, and root cause analysis for rapid problem resolution.
To get started with Instana as an IT administrator, see the IT admin quick start guide.
Developer
Developers focus on coding new microservices and cloud-native applications without worrying about infrastructure provisioning. They need to:
- Understand how application and infrastructure components interact and how issues propagate through the system
- Identify optimization opportunities in their code
- Analyze problems, explore solutions, and implement fixes efficiently
- Focus on application development and innovation rather than operational concerns
Key tasks:
- Find your service in Instana
- Analyze slow requests and traces
- Use AutoProfile for code-level analysis
- Investigate errors in your code
- Correlate logs with traces
Instana helps developers by providing code-level performance profiling through AutoProfile to locate hot spots and bottlenecks. It provides flame graph visualizations to identify and optimize hot paths, application perspectives to view all service components, pipeline feedback to assess release impact, and root cause analysis to correlate data from multiple sources.
To get started with Instana as a developer, see the Developer quick start guide.