Monitoring infrastructure
Instana ensures that at any time the infrastructure is monitored and represented as it is. All issues and changes that are detected on the infrastructure are constantly related to any occurring issues and incidents on the application and user level. In this way, you can have a comprehensive understanding of all parts that deliver the application.
Infrastructure across physical, virtual, cloud-based, hybrid, and containerized environments is the underlying layer that provides the resources and services for applications. However, monitoring infrastructure introduces several challenges:
Infrastructure monitoring software must scale and remain low maintenance:
- Discover all relevant components with their configuration, and ensure that the data is current;
- Track changes;
- Relate infrastructure issues to application impact, and vice versa.
Especially in modern architectures, the infrastructure is constantly changing and leverages concepts like clustering and autoscaling to ensure reliability, scaling, and flexibility.
For more information about how to monitor infrastructure with Instana, see the following topics:
Limitations
- Negative metric values are not displayed.
- Instana can ingest more than 3000 metrics per entity only when BeeInstana is active.
BeeInstana is enabled by default in all Instana SaaS deployments.
In self-hosted deployments:
- For Standard Edition, BeeInstana is enabled by default.
- For Custom Edition, BeeInstana is supported but might not be enabled by default in all installations.
- For Classic Edition, BeeInstana is not supported for production use. To use Beeinstana, you must migrate to Standard Edition.
The following table summarizes the behavior:
| Scenario | What happens |
|---|---|
| BeeInstana is inactive | Instana does not support ingestion beyond 3000 metrics per entity. |
| BeeInstana is active and the metrics are tagged | Instana can ingest more than 3000 tagged metrics per entity. Tagged metrics use one or more key-value pairs to identify the metric context. |
| Metrics are untagged | Ingestion is limited to 3000 metrics per entity per time interval for performance reasons. |
| Metrics do not appear in curated dashboards | The metrics might still be ingested. Check Analyze Infrastructure or custom dashboards to verify whether the metrics are available there. |
Metric visibility and metric ingestion are not always the same. If you do not see a metric in a curated dashboard, verify whether the metric is available in Analyze Infrastructure or custom dashboards. For more information about tagged and untagged metrics, see Metric identity.