Getting started with Instana

Install an agent

Using a single agent on each host, Instana collects data from your monitored systems. Depending on what type of systems you want to monitor and how you want to install the agent, there are multiple available options for you.

If you are planning a self-hosted installation of Instana, see our self-hosted install docs.

Discover your infrastructure

Automatically visualize and monitor your entire infrastructure. The Infrastructure map provides an overview of all your monitored systems, grouped by named zones, and within each zone are pillars comprised of opaque blocks that represent the software components running on that system.

Key entities in your infrastructure

The Instana landing page helps you to focus on key entities in various areas of your infrastructure. Depending on which areas are more important to you, the tiles can be reordered.

• Applications: the top 5 applications ordered by calls
• Websites: the top 5 websites ordered by page views.
• Infrastructure: based on the selected type, the infrastructure tile lists the top 5 hosts, containers or processes, ordered by CPU usage.
• Platforms: view entities from various platforms such as Kubernetes clusters, Cloud Foundry applications and vSphere data centers.
• Events: view incidents and issues that occurred in the configured time.

Application perspectives

Application perspectives enable you to capture the type of semantics that are meaningful to you. An application perspective is a filtered view on a set of services and endpoints that are defined by a shared context and is declared using tags.

Applications, services, and endpoints

Applications, services, and endpoints are automatically discovered, and relationships between services, endpoints, and your infrastructure are autocorrelated and saved to our Dynamic Graph.

Analyze traces

Instana AutoTrace™ is the distributed tracing and service discovery technology powering Instana’s fully automatic, no-effort, and instant observability experience. If your preference is to use customizable tracing, Instana also supports multiple custom tracing implementations, including a number of SDKs. For more information, see our Tracing docs.

Monitor websites and mobile apps

By analyzing actual browser request times and route loading times, gain insights into the web browsing experience of your end-users, as well as deep visibility into application call paths. The Instana website monitoring solution works by means of a lightweight JavaScript agent which is embedded into the monitored website. The Instana app monitoring solution works using an iOS agent which is installed as a dependency on mobile apps. For more information, see our Website monitoring and Mobile monitoring docs.

Root cause analysis

For each sensor, there is a curated knowledgebase of health signatures that are evaluated continuously against the incoming metrics and are used to raise issues or incidents depending on user impact. Instana provides you with built-in events that trigger issues or incidents based on failing health signatures on entities. We also provide you with the ability to create custom events that trigger issues or incidents based on your defined thresholds of an individual metric of any given entity. For more information, see our Events and alerts docs.

Profiling

Instana AutoProfile™ is an automated and continuous production profiler which enables you to continuously analyze code-level performance in production without negatively impacting production applications. For more information, see our Profiling docs.

Logging

Configure multiple logging integrations, and with one click, get directed to your configured integration. For more information, see our Logging docs.