Services

Create a custom service rule

1. From the sidebar, click Applications and select the Services tab.
2. Click Configure Services
3. Click Add Custom Service Rule
4. From the drop-down list, select the tags.

One reason for using a custom service rule is to use existing meta information of your infrastructure components. For example, if you label your Docker containers with domain-specific information, such as com.acme.service-name:myservice, to map services from this label select the docker.label and com.acme.service-name tags. All calls that pass a container with the label com.acme.service-name are associated with a service, which is named by that value, for example, myservice. There are multiple tags available to create custom service mapping.

You can also add multiple keys for service mapping. Multiple tags are concatenated with a dash. Note all keys need to match, For example, if you want to separate your staging services based on the host zone you can add two keys: host.zone + docker.label:com.acme.service-name. Your services would then be named with a concatenation of the values for the host zone followed by the docker label. That way you would separate out the two services for example prod-myservice and dev-myservice.

By using a special tag service.default_name, a custom service rule can also be used to extend service default rules with more tags. For example, to split the automatically created services by host zones, create the custom service rule by using the tags service.default_name and host.zone.

Apply the call tag service.name

To associate specific calls, annotate calls with , which enables tailored mappings within your code. For searching and analyzing calls, the service annotation is turned into the service.name tag.

To add call annotations, the following options are available:

• JavaSDK: https://github.com/instana/instana-java-sdk (SpanSupport.annotate).

• OpenTracing Java: https://github.com/instana/instana-java-opentracing (span.setTag).

• Python: https://github.com/instana/python-sensor (span.set_tag).

• Ruby: https://github.com/instana/ruby-sensor (span.set_tag).

• PHP: https://github.com/instana/instana-php-opentracing (\$span->setTag).

• Go: https://github.com/instana/go-sensor/ (span.SetTag).

• Node.js: See the Node.js configuration docs (process-wide configuration, providing individual names for different calls is not supported).

• Haskell: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/instana-haskell-trace-sdk (InstanaSDK.setServiceName).

For more information about the Java Trace SDK and the naming of services, see the conversion and naming section.

Specify the INSTANA_SERVICE_NAME environment variable

By setting the INSTANA_SERVICE_NAME environment variable on a process, the value of the environment variable is used as the service name for all calls that have as destination that process.

For more information on environment variables recognized by Instana, see, general reference docs.

Specify the X-Instana-Service HTTP header

By setting the X-Instana-Service HTTP header on a call, the destination (the service, which receives the HTTP request) is tagged with the value that is provided in the header.

Note: The X-Instana-Service HTTP header is not automatically collected. For it to work, the Instana agent must be configured , see "Capturing custom HTTP headers".

Map to unmonitored service with custom name

Calls to a service not monitored by Instana are mapped to a service by using call tags.

For example, HTTP calls to a third-party API such as www.google.com are mapped to service www.google.com based on the HTTP host header (call.http.host tag). Calls to www.google.fr or www.google.de are mapped to different services because the HTTP host headers are different.

You can map all the calls to different domains to a service named "Google" by adding the following manual service configuration:

{
    "tagFilterExpression": {
        "type": "TAG_FILTER",
        "name": "call.http.host",
        "value": "www.google.",
        "operator": "STARTS_WITH",
        "entity": "NOT_APPLICABLE"
    },
    "unmonitoredServiceName": "Google",
    "description": "Map calls to different google domains to Google service",
    "enabled": true
}

Link calls to an existing database or messaging service that is created from a monitored infrastructure entity

If a database or a messaging system is monitored by Instana, calls to that database or messaging system should be mapped to a service based on the infrastructure tag (e.g. MySQL@3306 on demo-host) thanks to infrastructure correlation. But sometimes due to the presence of a proxy or a load balancer, the infrastructure correlation may not work because Instana does not monitor or instrument that component and does not know how requests are routed. In consequence, calls will be mapped to a service based on the call tags (e.g. call.database.schema, call.database.connection or call.messaging.address) as if the destination service is not monitored.

In this case, you will find another service created from the infrastructure entity with no calls. You can use the following manual service configuration to map calls to that existing service:

{
    "tagFilterExpression": {
        "type": "TAG_FILTER",
        "name": "call.database.connection",
        "value": "jdbc:mysql://10.128.0.1:3306",
        "operator": "CONTAINS",
        "entity": "NOT_APPLICABLE"
    },
    "existingServiceId": "a880d1875389b78b49b19387ef7ab815b313764f", // service id of "MySQL@3306 on demo-host" service, can be found in the "serviceId" url parameter of the service dashboard
    "description": "Link calls to MySQL@3306 on demo-host service",
    "enabled": true
}

Why am I not seeing any services listed?

The reason no services are listed is due to either the agent not running in APM mode, having no agent installed; therefore, no traces were collected, or if you have an agent installed, traces were not collected during your selected timeframe.

To check whether an agent is installed and running, click Infrastructure to view any hosts on the infrastructure map that may have an agent, or click More > Agents to see a list of installed agents. If there are no agents listed, see the documentation on how to install an agent or create an application perspective.