Build 271

Instana Grafana datasource 4.0.0

To align with the latest updates from the Grafana team, all secure information, including the API key, must be stored in secureJsonData instead of jsonData.

From Instana release 270 in the Instana Grafana datasource 4.0.0, the API token, previously stored in jsonData is migrated to secureJsonData, which is a breaking change.

To prevent datasource breakage, you must reauthenticate the configuration page by providing the URL and API Token. For more information about the migration process, see the Instana Grafana datasource Configuration section.

Instana Grafana datasource 4.0.0 is the new base version and is only supported by Grafana 10.0.0 or later.

Automation framework general availability

Automation framework is now generally available. You can reduce diagnosis times, quickly remediate events, and improve your time to remediation with the automation framework.

You can create actions, curate them in the Action Catalog, and run them from Instana by using specialized automation sensors on an agent. An action might be a script, an HTTP call, an Ansible playbook, or a call to GitHub, GitLab, or Jira. Alternatively, an action might be a set of steps that you document.

You can use automation policies to associate an action with an event, or configure it to run automatically when the event occurs. AI-based recommendations help you choose the best action. Action history provides detailed information and traceability on the invocation of every action.

For more information, see Managing actions.

AWS RDS

Instana now supports the metric EBSIOBalance% for monitoring AWS RDS. For more information, see AWS RDS monitoring.

Azure Databricks

Instana now supports monitoring Azure Databricks. For more information, see Monitoring Azure Databricks.

Azure Machine Learning

Instana now supports monitoring Azure Machine Learning. For more information, see Monitoring Azure Machine Learning.

Contributor role for Applications

Instana now supports Contributor role for user access on Applications. For more information, see Managing user access on Applications.

Kafka sensor

Kafka sensor now supports JMX authentication with username and password to collect metrics.

Log file paths

Logs collected from log files now also show the path to the log file.

RBAC support for Business monitoring

Instana now supports controlling access to Business monitoring through Role Based Access Control (RBAC). For more information, see Business monitoring.

Select Infrastructure metrics with regex

Instana now supports selecting multiple Infrastructure metrics with a regex. For more information, see Using a regex to select metrics.

Tracing support for WebSphere and Liberty on z/OS

Instana now supports tracing for WebSphere and Liberty on zOS. For more information, see Instana on z/OS Tracing requirement for WebSphere, Instana on z/OS Tracing requirement for Liberty

Android and iOS agent automatically detect views (beta)

Instana Android and iOS agents now support a feature to automatically collect view information. Previously, you had to set the view name through API of the mobile app agent. For more information, see Mobile App View Detection.

Azure Databricks

Instana now supports monitoring the Unity Catalog of Azure Databricks. For more information, see Monitoring Azure Databricks.

Business monitoring

The business process and activity details pages now display the following information:

• The current number of instances that the process or activity started.
• The total number of errors (IT issues) that affect services on which the process or activity relies.
• A count chart of errors that affect the process-related or activity-related services over time.
• A distribution chart that shows the latency of calls within the process or activity over time with selectable aggregations.

The business activity details page now displays a top services chart within an activity according to the following selectable metrics: mean latency, call count, and erroneous call rate.

The business process top activities chart also allows selection between mean latency, call count, and erroneous call rate.

Db2 LUW sensor: Db2 pureScale metrics

The Db2 dashboard now shows pureScale Page Access Table, pureScale Package Cache Table, and pureScale Group Buffer Pool Table.

DRBD sensor

Instana now supports monitoring Distributed Replicated Storage System (DRBD). For more information, see Monitoring DRBD.

SAP ABAP monitoring

• Instana now automatically discovers and monitors SAP ABAP file system and Buffer Statistics metrics. For more information, see Monitoring SAP with ABAP Sensor(beta).

• Built-in events are added to detect Aborted and Cancelled Background jobs.

Synthetic monitoring browser tests

Browser test types in Synthetic monitoring are generally available (GA) now. For more information, see Using browser tests.

Added milliseconds resolution to call start time

The value of the call start time that is displayed in the call details panel on the Trace Detail page now includes resolution reduced to milliseconds.

Additional parameters for GetTraces API

You can now use the optional includeInternal and includeSynthetic parameters in the GetTraces API to control inclusion of internal and synthetic calls in the filtered output, just like for other APIs that support a tagFilterExpression parameter.

Alert notifications: Incremented alert about end-of-life Ruby runtime

Starting with Ruby sensor 1.6.6, an alert is displayed in the Instana UI when a Ruby runtime that is older than Ruby 3.1 end-of-life (EOL) is detected.

Automation policies support for smart alerts

Creating policies for various smart alerts such as Global Application Smart Alert, Website Smart Alert, Mobile Application Smart Alert, Infrastructure Smart Alert, Synthetics Smart Alert, and Log Smart Alert is supported. For more information, see Creating an automation policy.

Better search in tag or metric catalog

Searching the catalog for tags and metrics yields more relevant results. Previously, searching for the word "namespace" used to return namespace labels for CRI-O and ContainerD as the first results. Now, when you search for "namespace", Kubernetes namespace UID, name, and labels are the first results. Also, search terms are now highlighted.

Searching can also be scoped within a category.

For example, after you select a category such as JVM, searching will happen only within that category.

Improved log level pattern matching

Earlier Informational,Warning, and case-sensitive log messages were matched to UNKNOWN log level. Now the pattern matching is improved to match the log messages to the respective log levels. For example, the Warning log messages are matched to the WARN log level.

Improved percentage calculation of time data

The percentage of duration for waiting time, self-time, and network time is only calculated if the duration is greater than or equal to one millisecond.

Improved performance in Analyze Infrastructure

• Loading the entity list is faster when no metrics are selected
• Commonly used tags are optimized for filtering and grouping

Refine Instana-hosted PoP deployment status

Now, Synthetic monitoring uses the activation queue and deployment status to influence the reported status of the activation of an Instana-hosted PoP. This process prevents the activation from being reported in error status too quickly.

Search functionality on the Agent Details page

Now you can search for Agent zones on the Agent Details page.

Service mapping for Db2

Db2 calls are mapped to different service names based on the port and host. The pattern is Db2@<port> on <host>.

Synthetic PoP

The Node.js runtime is upgraded to 18.19.1 in both the JavaScript playback engine and Browserscript playback engine in Synthetic PoP 1.1.7.

Trace details

You are now informed about the following options:

• Retries when the trace details take longer to load
• Possible causes if the trace cannot be found even after 3 unsuccessful retries

Deactivate Instana-hosted PoPs

To stop using an Instana-hosted PoP, you can deactivate the PoP. To deactivate the PoP, click Deactivate action on the Synthetic Monitoring page. For more information, see Disabling Managed locations.

Elasticsearch shard level metrics

The index table on the Elasticsearch node dashboard now displays details of indexes with shards on the node, as the data aggregated from the shards on the node. To ensure the correctness of the index metrics displayed on the cluster dashboard, you must upgrade the Elasticsearch sensor to version 1.1.72.

Finer infrastructure tag suggestions

Infrastructure tag suggestions are tailored based on the current filter.

For example, when you are filtering on a Kubernetes Cluster, adding a Kubernetes Namespace tag to the filter list prompts suggestions for namespaces from the selected cluster.

Improved error handling for infrastructure analytics pipeline

The API endpoint /api/infrastructure-monitoring/analyze/metrics now issues a 503 SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE response with a meaningful error message when the analytics pipeline is not configured correctly.

SAP HANA sensor

• Instana now supports monitoring of SAP HANA SQL Plan Cache Statistics.
• Queuing connection support is added to Connections information.
• Consolidated the underlying charts of garbage collection statistics.

For more information, see Monitoring SAP HANA.

Synthetic monitoring

To support Multifactor Authentication (MFA) in Synthetic browser testing, a new API $browser.generateTOTPToken is added to generate a Time-based One-time Password (TOTP) token from a TOTP key in Synthetic PoP 1.1.8. For more information, see Browser API Reference.

Tuxedo sensor

Improved the loading time of metrics of the Tuxedo sensor in the Queues table. In addition, the drop-down option in each row that contains two charts is now removed. You can click an item in the Queue Id column to view the charts.

Logs in Application Trace

Previously, to view the log message of a log item on the Application calls or traces page, you hovered over the log item. Now, you must click the log item to view the log message.

Monitoring NGINX

The parsing of geo blocks in the NGINX configuration files is fixed.

Synthetic monitoring

• Now, the filter label on the Locations tab in the Synthetic UI is Type instead of Location.
• Now, if the Synthetic monitoring Open APIs are used from the UI, the user's Limited access to Synthetic tests is enforced.
• Now, the datacenter activation message format is correct, allowing for an accurate translation of the message.

Call details layout

In certain call details views, the position of the header in the stack trace section was off. The position is now correctly set.

Synthetic monitoring

If a time in the future was entered by using Open API, Synthetic test data was returned. This issue is fixed. Now, if a time in the future is entered, an error message is displayed.

Unidentified infrastructure entity types

Entity types, such as Redis Enterprise database, Redis Enterprise shard, and Kafka task, lacked proper identification and dashboard. This issue is now fixed.

WebSphere Application Server sensor

Previously, the WebSphere Application Server in the Windows platform was not monitored by the Instana host agent because the server name contained an empty space. This issue is now fixed.

271-1

• Updated the base image of the Instana backend components.
• Added resource profile optimizations.

271-2

• Fixed an issue with the email notification channel where the email was sometimes not UTF-8 encoded and had cosmetic issues.
• Fixed an issue with third-party API calls in the Instana backend.