Integrating with IBM Turbonomic

You can integrate IBM® Instana Observability with IBM® Turbonomic so that Turbonomic can discover and optimize entities that Instana manages in your environment. After you integrate, you can also review and execute Turbonomic actions from your Instana user interface (UI).

Before you begin

Ensure that you have the following prerequisites:

  • Instana and Turbonomic Standard licenses (SaaS or self-hosted) with a minimum of 200 Managed Virtual Servers (MVS).
  • Turbonomic version 8.13.6 or later:
    • Before you can integrate, you must configure an Instana target in Turbonomic. For more information, see Instana in the Turbonomic documentation.
    • If the underlying infrastructure for your Instana-managed applications runs on Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift, ensure that the Turbonomic Kubeturbo probe is deployed.
    • In Turbonomic, you must be in the administrator, deployer, or automator role to configure this integration. For more information, see Managing user accounts in the Turbonomic documentation.
  • Instana release 242 or later:
    • An Instana host agent must be installed to collect data in your environment. For the purposes of this integration, the host agent does not require root privileges and the best practice is to install it as a non-root user.
    • To run Turbonomic actions from the Instana UI after the integration is complete, you must have Instana Running of automation actions permissions. For more information, see Managing user access.
    • For a self-hosted instance of Instana, you must enable the feature flag for the automation framework. For more information, see Managing actions.
    • The Classic Edition of Instana is not supported, as it does not support the necessary components for this integration.

About this task

Turbonomic uses the configured Instana target to collect data about applications that Instana manages and includes the discovered information in its calculations for resource actions. When you enable the Turbonomic sensor in your Instana instance, you can manage these actions from the Instana UI. This sensor polls Turbonomic APIs every 10 minutes to retrieve information about executed and recommended Turbonomic actions.

These actions help optimize the following entities:

  • Applications
  • Services
  • Endpoints
  • Virtual machines
  • Containers
  • Java virtual machines (JVMs)
  • Database servers
  • Kubernetes workload controllers and namespaces

Configuring the Turbonomic sensor

In Instana, configure the Turbonomic sensor. Update the agent configuration file (instana-agent-dir/etc/instana/configuration.yaml), as shown in the following example. Replace the brackets (< >) and enclosed content with the values that are specific to your Instana and Turbonomic instances:

# Turbonomic sensor
com.instana.plugin.turbonomic:
 enabled: true
 host: '<Turbonomic server host or IP address in https://x.x.x.x format>'
 target: '<Hostname or IP address of the Instana target as configured in Turbonomic>'
 auth:
  username: <Your Turbonomic username>
  password: <Your Turbonomic user password>

The value for target must match exactly with the Hostname or IP address field in the Turbonomic target configuration.

Configure only one Instana host agent with this sensor per Turbonomic instance. A single sensor collects all Turbonomic action data for your environment. In Kubernetes environments, deploy the Instana agent separately on a dedicated machine to help ensure that only one agent monitors Turbonomic entities.

Results

Your Turbonomic and Instana instances are now integrated. Turbonomic can recommend and execute actions to optimize the resources that support your Instana-managed applications. You can review recommended and executed Turbonomic actions from the Instana UI.

What to do next

For information about the different ways you can review and execute Turbonomic actions in the Instana UI, see Managing Turbonomic actions.

Troubleshooting the Turbonomic sensor

By default, the Turbonomic sensor validates the Turbonomic server certificate. However, if your Turbonomic instance uses a self-signed certificate, validation fails with an exception that is similar to the following example:

turbonomic_sensor_exception : Auth API Exception [PKIX path building failed:
sun.security.provider.certpath.SunCertPathBuilderException: unable to find valid certification path to requested target]

To resolve this error, you can override the certificate validation by setting the ignoreCertErrors property in your sensor configuration, as shown in the following example:

# Turbonomic sensor
com.instana.plugin.turbonomic:
 enabled: true
 ignoreCertErrors: true
 host: '<Turbonomic server host or IP address in https://x.x.x.x format>'
 target: '<Hostname or IP address of the Instana target as configured in Turbonomic>'
 auth:
  username: <Your Turbonomic username>
  password: <Your Turbonomic user password>