Getting started: How to get an overview of your IT landscape

The infrastructure map: An overview of all your monitored systems

Infrastructure - physical, virtual, cloud, hybrid, containerized - is the underlying layer that provides the resources and services needed for applications.

Instana ensures that your infrastructure is always monitored and represented as it is. All issues and changes that are detected on the infrastructure are constantly related to any occurring issues and incidents on the application and end user level - giving the users a comprehensive understanding of all parts that deliver the application.

You can use the infrastructure map to see an overview of all your monitored systems, which are grouped by named zones. Within each zone are pillars comprised of opaque blocks. Each pillar as a whole represents one agent running on the respective system. Each block within the pillars represents the software components running on that system, and will change color to reflect the component's health. Specific types of components can be processes (a JVM or an Apache process), or specific servers running within those processes, such as a Tomcat server within a JVM.

To learn more about the infrastructure map, see infrastructure map.

Dashboards: An overview of all your monitored systems

Instana provides curated dashboards to support common use cases.

You can easily create your own custom dashboards directly within the Instana UI. You can also create custom dashboards by using the following options:

• Use the Instana data source plug-in for Grafana when you'd like to combine Instana data with other data sources, or if you have advanced dashboarding needs.
• Query the Instana web REST API and build dashboards in the tool of your choice for complete flexibility. You can use the Instana web REST API to retrieve data, such as traces and metrics, and to perform configuration, such as for service extraction and user management.