Frequently asked questions

What is Instana?

Instana is an observability platform that automatically develops a comprehensive understanding of cloud applications. Instana offers actionable insights to address and resolve IT issues, such as:

• Delays in response times
• Nonfunctioning services
• Infrastructure failures

The technology offers organizations a complete view of their applications and infrastructure with strategies to minimize troubleshooting and enhance performance.

Is Instana fully automated or do I need to set it up manually?

Instana automates every aspect of your performance monitoring cycle. From application discovery, monitoring configuration, dashboards, and alerts through to troubleshooting - all your bases are covered. With no additional effort for installation, configuration or maintenance - Instana automates full-stack application visibility - including real-time change detection, mapping, tracing, and profiling. You can locate the source of every error and application bottleneck With Instana, you can fix issues before they turn into incidents.

Does Instana provide comprehensive full-stack visibility, collect all traces, and offer real-time visibility as a feature?

Instana provides real-time visibility into your full-stack applications and performance. It automatically detects changes, mapping, tracing, and profiling, which helps you to pinpoint the root cause of every error. With this capability, you can resolve issues before they escalate into incidents.

It offers high-fidelity metrics with a granularity of one second and automatically traces every request. You can complete end-to-end tracing without any sampling or partial traces. The event correlation feature aids in resolving potential issues and decreasing your Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).

How does Instana reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)? What insights does Instana offer?

Instana improves the early identification of issues during the pre-production phase and results in increasing developer productivity. It helps teams to concentrate on innovation by offering valuable insights.

Instana's capabilities include:

• Real-time detection and mapping of interdependencies
• Data filtering
• Immediate identification of performance outliers and problem patterns

With Instana, developers can proactively tackle issues and implement enhancements without relying on manual scripting or extensive tagging.

What are the technologies that Instana supports, and what types of sensors, tools, and integrations it provides?

Instana supports a wide range of technologies, over 300, for your convenience:

• Sensors: Instana's extensive microservices and cloud-native application monitoring solution, which includes full-stack observability.
• Tools: Automatically connect your DevOps, developer, IT operations, and SRE tools to facilitate automated application monitoring and optimize your collected data.
• Integrations: Effortlessly integrates with various products to deliver advanced infrastructure, application management, and monitoring capabilities.

For more information about Instana's full list of supported technologies, see Supported technologies.

What key differences separate Instana from its competitors?

If you're considering a change and want to switch to Instana, then Instana has a few compelling reasons:

• Traditional application monitoring tools might not suffice for cloud-native applications
• Effective monitoring of cloud-native apps needs high granularity and cardinality
• Complete, correlated full-stack visibility is essential
• End-to-end distributed tracing is crucial for real-time issue detection and resolution
• Instana's AI-driven automated or semi-automated remediation capabilities expedite problem-solving

For more information about why users are transitioning to Instana, see Reasons to migrate to Instana.

What value does Instana bring to my organization?

You can now conduct a business value assessment directly on the Instana product page. Check the following reference to complete the assessment and uncover Instana's potential benefits for your business. By answering just five straightforward questions, you receive an estimate of reduced application disruptions, improved IT efficiency, and potential revenue savings.

For more information about exploring the business value assessment, see Instana pricing.

What is a host or Managed Virtual Server (MVS)?

Instana employs a host or MVS as a licensing metric. This host can encompass physical machines, virtual servers, or worker nodes.

Physical machines include physical computers, blades, rack-mounted devices, or any device with processing units, memory, and input or output capabilities that run applications or application parts.

A virtual server might be a virtual computer that is created by dividing a physical server's resources or an unpartitioned physical server. The licensee must acquire an MVS license for each virtual server they manage.

For more information about Instana's licensing, see Instana pricing.

How to access a trial or demo version of Instana?

You can discover Instana's capabilities through a hands-on experience.

• Explore a sandbox environment to experiment with Instana
• Sign up to modify and access a sandbox Instana setup
• Schedule a live demo with an expert to discuss your business use case and see it in action
• Sign up for a free trial
• Begin a 14-day trial with all Instana capabilities without using a credit card