Quick start guide for all users

Before you begin, make sure that you have:

• Access to your Instana tenant URL (for example, https://your-tenant.instana.io)
• Your Instana agent key (provided by your admin)
• Appropriate permissions to install agents on your infrastructure

Access the Instana UI to set up your instance.

1. Open your Instana tenant URL in a browser.
2. Log in with your credentials.

For an in-depth breakdown of the user interface navigation and structure, see Instana UI navigation.

The Instana agent automatically discovers and monitors your applications. Installing the agent starts data collection so Instana can map your environment, detect services, and surface performance issues across your stack.

1. From the navigation menu, go to Agents & collectors > Instana agents.
2. Click Install agents.
3. Select your host type and installation method based on your infrastructure.
4. Follow the instructions to install and run the agent.

Verifying the installation confirms that data is flowing correctly and that Instana can begin monitoring your environment. This check detects setup issues early before you rely on dashboards, alerts, or traces.

Complete the following steps from the Instana UI:

1. Go to Agents & collectors > Agent details.
2. Wait 1-2 minutes for your agent to appear.
3. Verify the agent status shows as green.

For more information, see Instana agents.

The infrastructure map provides a real-time view of how hosts, processes, containers, and services are connected. It makes dependencies easier to understand, exposes unhealthy components, and shows the blast radius of issues, which is one of the ways Instana stands out during troubleshooting.

Complete the following steps from the Instana UI:

1. Go to Infrastructure > Map.
2. Click any component to see detailed metrics.

For more information, see Infrastructure map.

Application monitoring shows how your services behave in production by bringing latency, traffic, errors, and dependencies together in one place. This view makes it easier to spot regressions and focus on the services that affect user experience.

Complete the following steps from the Instana UI:

1. Go to Applications > Services.
2. See all automatically discovered services.
3. Click a service to view:
   • Request rate and latency
   • Error rates
   • Dependencies
   • Endpoints

For more information, see Application Monitoring.

Tracing shows the full path of a request across services so you can see where time is spent and where failures occur. This view is useful for isolating bottlenecks and pinpointing the service or dependency behind an issue.

Complete the following steps from the Instana UI:

1. Go to Applications.
2. Click any application or service to see:
   • Complete request flow
   • Timing breakdown
   • Errors and exceptions

For more information, see Tracing.

An Application Perspective is a powerful tool for monitoring, alerting, and analysis of your microservice environment. It organizes services so teams stay focused on what matters to them and generates feature-rich dashboards for the golden signals (latency, traffic, errors, and saturation).

Complete the following steps from the Instana UI:

1. Go to Applications > Applications tab.
2. Click + Add to create a new application perspective.
3. Select model - Choose the type of application to model:
   • Services or endpoints - For well-known services that won't change frequently
   • A critical user journey - For monitoring specific user interactions and business transactions
   • Environment or region - For grouping by cloud, zone, or host information
   • An important customer or tenant - For customer-specific dashboards using HTTP parameters or custom tags
   • Kubernetes or container - For grouping by namespace, container name, or platform labels
   • Request attributes - For filtering by HTTP headers, query parameters, or RPC methods
   • Technology - For grouping by database type, Java application, or scripting application
   • Custom tags - For custom metadata added via SDK, platform, or agent
4. Click Next to proceed.
5. Specify application - Define the application scope:
   • Add filters by using tags (for example, database or technology).
   • Select downstream services to include:
     • No downstream services - Source perspective only
     • Immediate downstream database and messaging services - Includes direct dependencies
     • All downstream services - End-to-end view
   • View matched services in real-time.
   • Click Next to proceed.
6. Provide details - Configure the perspective:
   • Application perspective name - Enter a descriptive name
   • Select default dashboard view - Choose between Inbound calls or All calls
7. Click Create to generate the application perspective.
8. View the auto-generated dashboard that shows service health, performance metrics, error rates, and dependencies.

For more information, see Application perspectives.

Watch the Application Perspectives Tech Intro video to learn more.

Smart Alerts detect important changes in service behavior without requiring constant dashboard monitoring. They notify the right teams when latency, errors, throughput, or other signals cross meaningful thresholds so response can start sooner with less noise.

Instana provides 8 types of Smart Alerts that you can configure from different areas of the UI:

• Application Smart Alerts - Configure from Applications > Smart Alerts
• Website Smart Alerts - Configure from Websites & mobile apps > Websites, click the website name, then click Smart Alerts
• Mobile app Smart Alerts - Configure from Websites & mobile apps > Mobile apps, click the app name, then click Smart Alerts
• Infrastructure Smart Alerts - Configure from Infrastructure > Smart Alerts
• Generative AI app Smart Alerts - Configure from Infrastructure > Smart Alerts (select GenAI app as entity type)
• Service level objectives (SLO) Smart Alerts - Configure from Service levels > Smart Alerts
• Synthetic tests Smart Alerts - Configure from Synthetic monitoring > Smart Alerts
• Logging Smart Alerts - Configure from Logs > Smart Alerts

You can also access all Smart Alerts from the Analytics menu.

The following example shows how to create a Smart Alert that triggers when API calls exceed 2000 ms latency:

1. From the navigation menu, go to Events > Smart Alert configurations.
2. Click Create Smart Alert.
3. In the Trigger section, select Slow calls as the blueprint.
4. In the Type of threshold section, select Static.
5. In the Scope section, select per service in the context of each application perspective, then select Inbound calls. From the service list, select the service that you want to monitor (for example, payment-api-app).
6. In the Threshold section, configure the following settings:
   • Set Latency at 90th percentile.
   • Select Warning and enter 2000 ms as the threshold value.
7. In the Time threshold section, select When the condition persists over a specified amount of time, then set the Evaluation granularity to 5 min and Number of consecutive metric violations to 1.
8. In the Alert channels section, click Select alert channels and choose your notification channel (for example, Slack or email).
9. In the Additional alert properties section, enter a title (for example, Calls are slower than usual) and optionally add a description. Enable Triggers incident if you want this alert to create an incident.
10. Click Create to save and activate the Smart Alert.

For more information, see Alerting.

Watch the Alerting Tech Intro video for a view into alert configuration.

Dashboards organize the metrics that matter most to your team in one shared view. They support ongoing health checks, incident response, and stakeholder reporting without requiring repeated navigation across the product.

Complete the following steps from the Instana UI:

1. Go to Custom dashboards.
2. Click Create dashboard, enter a name, and click Create.
3. Click Add widget and select a widget type (Apdex chart, Big number, Chart: pie, time series, Histogram, Markdown, SLO, SLO Legacy, Table, Time zone, Top list).
4. Click Next and configure the widget by selecting data source, metrics, and display options.
5. Click Create to add the widget to your dashboard.
6. Customize time range, add filters, and arrange widgets as needed.
7. Click Save changes.
8. Share the dashboard with your team by adjusting permissions.

For more information, see Building custom dashboards.

Incident investigation in Instana brings incidents, triggering events, affected entities, and recommended actions into one workflow. This context speeds up diagnosis and makes it easier to decide what to do next.

Complete the following steps from the Instana UI:

1. Go to Events > Incidents to view the incidents list and chart.
2. Click an incident to see the incident details. If the incident has an identified probable root cause, you can click Run investigation to start an AI-assisted investigation:
   • Triggered, Ended, Duration, Severity, and Affected entities
   • Incident overview with the option to generate a summary
   • Triggering event details with the View triggering event button
   • Metric violations that caused the incident
3. Scroll down to view the Recommended actions tab, which shows AI-generated recommendations.
4. Click Generate action to create automated remediation steps based on the event summary and entity type.

For more information, see Root cause analysis.

Task	Navigation path
View all services	Applications > Services
See infrastructure map	Infrastructure > Map
View recent incidents	Events > Incidents
Create dashboard	Custom dashboards
Query metrics	Analytics
Configure alerts	Events > Smart alert configurations
View traces	Applications > Subtraces
Check logs	Analytics > Logs
Set up SLOs	Service levels > Service level objectives