Getting started
Start your Instana journey with comprehensive resources for learning, deploying, and monitoring your applications and infrastructure.
IBM Instana Observability provides full-stack observability that is powered by agentic AI. Whether you're evaluating Instana, setting up your first deployment, or exploring advanced capabilities, these resources guide you through every step.
Try Instana
Experience Instana through a sandbox or full-featured environment free trial.
- Instana APM Observability Sandbox
- Access a pre-configured sandbox environment with demo data for immediate exploration. Sign up with your business email to quickly experience Instana without installing agents or configuring your own environment.
- Full-featured environment
- Get hands-on experience with IBM Instana Observability through a full-featured free trial. Install agents and monitor your own applications and infrastructure. Explore full-stack observability, automated discovery, and AI-powered insights with your actual workloads.
Learn about Instana
Understand what Instana is and how it works before you begin.
- Architecture and components
- See how the Instana backend, agent, UI, and other components work together.
- Personas and use cases
- Discover how different roles (IT admins, developers, SREs, and DevOps engineers) use Instana to solve their specific challenges and improve system reliability.
- Core capabilities
- Learn about Instana's automated discovery, monitoring, and AI-powered insights for your entire technology stack. Explore application monitoring, distributed tracing, infrastructure monitoring, and Instana's full-stack observability for AI-powered applications. See how AI agents and LLM observability provide deeper visibility into agent behavior, decision-making, and business impact.
Explore the user interface
Learn how to access and navigate the Instana user interface.
- Accessing the user interface
- Find the supported web browsers, log in with your email or Google SSO, and share Instana URLs with other users.
- Instana user interface navigation
- Get familiar with the header bar, navigation panel, time range selector, and main content area.
Follow the quick start guides
Get up and running quickly with step-by-step guides that are tailored to your needs.
Either follow the guide for all users, or follow a persona-specific guide.
- Quick start guide for all users
- Complete essential tasks that include installing agents, exploring infrastructure, monitoring applications, setting up alerts, and investigating issues. The guide covers the fundamental workflow that applies to all Instana users.
- Or
- Quick start guides for each persona
- Follow role-specific guides that are designed for IT admins, developers, SREs, and DevOps engineers. Each guide focuses on the tasks and workflows that are most relevant to your responsibilities.
Get help and support
Access community resources, documentation, and technical support.
For more information, see Resources and support.