Get a unified view of your environment with sidekick

Sidekick is a collapsible sidebar that provides a unified view of key signals from across your environment, customized for what you are currently working on. This view helps you quickly spot issues and take action without switching among different tools.

This sidebar collects insights about your applications from IBM Instana, IBM Turbonomic, and IBM Concert. You can find insights such as:

  • Summary health indicators for your applications
  • Recommended actions to address anomalies and fix inefficiencies
  • Alerts about vulnerabilities and exposures
  • Assessments of your application resilience

Your sidekick experience is personalized based on your available tools. With this centralized view, you save time by eliminating the need to switch between different tools to monitor your application's health and performance.

Unified insights for smarter decisions

Sidekick adds value when you use multiple integrated observability products to manage the same application resources. Depending on your entitlements and your current user interface (UI) context, you get immediate access to critical information from Instana, Turbonomic, and Concert in one convenient place.

The sidebar does not show data from your current UI context. For example, when you are in Instana, you don't see Instana data in sidekick. Instead of replicating data from your main UI context, sidekick gives you an overview of key signals from other tools in your environment without requiring you to switch your primary view:

  • In Instana, it can show resource optimization insights from Turbonomic and resilience and vulnerability data from Concert.
  • In Turbonomic, it can show performance metrics from Instana and resilience and vulnerability data from Concert.
  • In Concert, it can show performance metrics from Instana and resource optimization insights from Turbonomic.

The metrics from each product are collected into widgets. You can click any widget to change your main UI context to the source of the data in the corresponding product.

Figure 1. The sidekick sidebar
The sidekick sidebar

Where to find sidekick

This sidebar is available on application-scoped pages when you integrate Instana with Turbonomic, Concert, or both. These integrations enable a shared data layer among your integrated products that surfaces insights from across your environment.

To open the sidekick from Instana:

  1. From the unified navigation menu, click Instana > Applications.
  2. Select an application.
  3. Click the pulsing beacon to open sidekick, as shown in the following image.
Figure 2. Opening sidekick
Opening sidekick

To open sidekick from Turbonomic:

  1. From the unified navigation menu, click Turbonomic > Search.
  2. Select Business Applications.
  3. Select an application.
  4. Click the pulsing beacon to open sidekick.

To open sidekick from Concert:

  1. From the unified navigation menu, click Concert > Application inventory.
  2. Select an application.
  3. Click the pulsing beacon to open sidekick.

Insights overview

Depending on your entitlements and your current UI context, sidekick can display the following widgets:

Each widget includes a color-based severity indicator that alerts you when issues in your environment require immediate attention.

Performance

The Performance widget displays application insights from Instana. This widget appears in sidekick when you view an application in Turbonomic or Concert in your main UI context.

The severity indicator shows red, yellow, or green, based on the most severe open performance issue detected for your application. This indicator reflects the urgency and potential impact of the issue.

  • Red: At least one critical issue exists. Immediate investigation is required. Review the application in Instana for details.
  • Yellow: No critical issues exist, but one or more warning-level issues are present. Review these issues in Instana to determine whether action is required.
  • Green: No critical or warning-level issues are currently detected. Continue monitoring the application.

The performance widget shows the following metrics from Instana that relate to the scoped application:

  • Calls per second: This metric tracks how many service calls are made or received each second, offering a real-time view of system throughput. It helps you understand traffic volume, detect anomalies like sudden spikes or drops, and assess whether services are scaling effectively. For more information, see Monitoring applications.

  • Erroneous call rate: This metric measures the percentage of service calls that result in errors, such as HTTP 4xx/5xx responses, timeouts, or exceptions. It is a key indicator of application health and reliability. This metric can help identify failing services or degraded performance and enable faster incident response and root cause analysis. For more information, see Monitoring applications.

  • Mean latency: This metric measures the average time that it takes a service to process a request, including processing time within the service and any time spent waiting on downstream dependencies. It helps assess how efficiently services perform under different loads. A rising mean latency can indicate performance degradation, bottlenecks, or overloaded components. For more information, see Monitoring applications: Latency distribution.

  • Issues: The issues counter logs how many Instana issues impact the scoped application. An issue is an event that gets created if an application, service, or any part thereof gets degraded. Instana comes with several hundred curated health signatures that detect various problems, from degrade of service quality, to complex infrastructure issues, to disk saturation. Issues are automatically resolved when the metrics, events, or metadata return to the expected values. For more information, see Root cause analysis: Issues.

Optimization

The Optimization widget displays application insights from Turbonomic. This widget appears in sidekick when you view an application in Instana or Concert in your main UI context.

The severity indicator shows red, orange, yellow, or green, based on the most severe infrastructure state detected for your application. This indicator reflects the urgency of optimization issues.

  • Red: One or more infrastructure components are in a critical state. Immediate attention is required. Review details in Turbonomic.
  • Yellow: No critical issues exist, but one or more components have minor issues. Review these issues to maintain optimal performance.
  • Green: All infrastructure components are operating normally. No action is required.

The optimization widget shows the following metrics from Turbonomic that relate to the scoped entity:

  • Health: This percentage-based metric indicates the proportion of underlying infrastructure entities with no pending optimization actions. A higher percentage means that more entities are currently optimized for performance and cost efficiency. For example, a health score of 67% means 67% of entities are optimized, while 33% have actionable recommendations to improve resource usage. Use this percentage to get a quick assessment of optimization opportunities in your environment.

  • Potential savings: This value shows your potential monthly cloud savings from actions that you can take through Turbonomic or through your cloud provider. For example, deleting unattached volumes can reduce costs. For more information, see Potential savings chart in the Turbonomic documentation.

  • Recommended actions: These actions address the most severe performance risks for the scoped application or entity. These actions resolve performance risks and reduce costs, are nondisruptive, and are ready for immediate execution. For more information, see Turbonomic actions in the Turbonomic documentation.

Vulnerabilities

The Vulnerabilities widget displays application insights from the Concert vulnerability dimension. This widget appears in sidekick when you view an application in Turbonomic or Instana in your main UI context.

The severity indicator shows red or green, based on whether any critical security issues are detected. This indicator reflects the presence of Priority 1 vulnerabilities or exposures.

  • Red: One or more Priority 1 CVEs or security exposures exist. These issues pose an immediate security risk. Urgent remediation is required. Review the details in on the application page Concert.
  • Green: No Priority 1 CVEs or exposures are detected. Continue monitoring the application.

The vulnerabilities widget shows the following metrics from Concert that relate to the application. For more information about these resources, see Viewing vulnerability data in the Concert documentation.

  • Priority 1 CVEs: This value shows the number of priority 1 CVEs discovered in your environment. Concert assigns CVE priority levels based on configurable risk factors. You can open tickets directly in the Concert UI to populate your external ticketing system or create an automation rule to automatically create tickets for prioritized CVEs.

  • Priority 1 exposures: This value shows the number of priority 1 non-CVE exposures that are discovered in your environment. Concert assigns priority levels to exposures based on configurable risk factors. You can open tickets directly in the Concert UI to populate your external ticketing system or create an automation rule to automatically create tickets for prioritized exposures.

  • Recommended actions: This table lists actions to mitigate the highest risk CVEs that affect the scoped application. Further details are provided on the Vulnerabilities tab of the application page in Concert.

Resilience

The Resilience widget shows your resilience score from Concert. A resilient application can recover quickly from unexpected disruptions or failures without impacting productive use. You can define how Concert measures resilience in your applications by selecting a set of nonfunctional requirements (NFRs). NFRs are a set of constraints or qualities that a system must have beyond its functional requirements to be considered resilient. The non functional requirements that you set in Concert address various operational concerns, such as availability, scalability, recoverability, and maintainability.

When you view an application in Turbonomic or Instana, the resilience widget displays the application resilience score from Concert. This score is a measure of an application's resilience based on aggregated data from various sources and the NFRs that you define. The score is derived by analyzing real-time and historical data such as error rates, latency, throughput, incident frequency, and recovery times. Unlike some metrics, lower resilience scores represent more critical situations.

The severity indicator shows red, yellow, or green, based on the application’s overall resilience score. This indicator reflects how well the application can withstand and recover from disruptions.

  • Red: Resilience score is 0–39. Significant resilience issues exist. Immediate attention is required to reduce business risk.
  • Yellow: Resilience score is 40–59. Moderate resilience concerns exist. Review and improve resilience measures.
  • Green: Resilience score is 60–100. The application has a good resilience posture. Continue monitoring and maintaining best practices.

For more information, see Resilience: Overview in the Concert documentation.

How to modify the time range

Use the time range menu to set the range for the data in sidekick. The following time range settings are available:

  • Last 24 hours (default)
  • Last 7 days
  • Last 30 days
  • Last year

Troubleshooting

If sidekick cannot retrieve the data, check the following details.

Your Instana SaaS instance is integrated with a SaaS instance of Turbonomic, Concert, or both

To share data among your integrated observability products, you must use a SaaS instance of Instana and have trial or full access to a SaaS instance of Turbonomic, Concert, or both. Also, enable the integration of these products by following the steps that are described in Automated integration with IBM Concert and Automated integration with IBM Turbonomic. These integrations help ensure that your observability products are tracking the same application and infrastructure resource and can freely share data.

Your applications use the same name in Concert that they use in Instana

For the shared data layer to correlate resources across your integrated Instana and Concert instances, the resource names must match from one product to the next. For example, if your application is named myApp1 in Instana, this application must use the same name in Concert for sidekick to discover data about it.