About Instana

Instana is an observability platform that helps you to analyze and troubleshoot microservices and containerized applications. It provides automated application performance monitoring, end user monitoring, root cause analysis, and anomaly detection. With Instana, you can gain complete visibility into the health and performance of your applications and services.

Core capabilities include:

  • Full-stack visibility from infrastructure to application code.
  • Application perspectives to organize and view your applications from different viewpoints.
  • Automated discovery and monitoring of your application infrastructure with 1-second granularity.
  • Context guide to navigate through your application context with guided insights.
  • Logging to collect, analyze, and correlate logs with other observability data.
  • Pipeline feedback to integrate observability into your CI/CD pipelines.
  • Root cause analysis to identify the root cause of issues with automated analysis.
  • Unbounded analytics for analyzing unlimited data with flexible querying capabilities

Instana extends its observability platform with AI-powered capabilities that help you monitor AI applications, automate investigation, and accelerate incident resolution:

AI capabilities include:

  • Generative AI observability to monitor and troubleshoot generative AI applications with comprehensive observability across LLMs, AI agents, and vector databases.
  • AI gateway to connect to watsonx.ai or external LLM services to enable various generative AI use cases.
  • AI evaluation to assess and monitor the quality, accuracy, and reliability of LLM outputs.
  • AI agent framework monitoring to track LLM interactions, tool usage, workflow execution, and costs for AI agents built with frameworks.
  • Instana AI assistant (public preview) as a conversational interface that uses natural language to query and analyze observability data.
  • Intelligent incident investigation by using agentic AI, causal AI analysis, and LLMs.
  • Intelligent Remediation with AI to automatically detect and resolve issues by using AI-powered action and script generation.
  • Incident summarization: Generate AI-powered summaries of incidents for faster understanding and resolution.
  • AI cost tracking: Monitor and optimize AI spending with detailed cost calculations for token usage and model operations.
  • Smart Alerts for AI applications: Set up alerts for AI metrics like token usage, costs, and request volumes.
  • AI infrastructure monitoring: Track GPU usage, model inference latency, memory consumption, and compute efficiency for AI deployments.

How Instana works

Instana automatically makes your applications and services visible, provides context to that observed information, and then empowers you to take intelligent action based on that information.

  • Automates discovery and visibility: Automatically discover and monitor your applications, services, infrastructure, web browsers, mobile applications, and more for over 200 domain-specific technologies. In addition, view real-time data through distributed tracing and 1-second metrics.

  • Provides context: Automate dependency mapping across the full stack for flexible application perspectives and get powerful and easy-to-use data analytics. Put performance data in context for rapid issue prevention and remediation. You can drill down to generate new insights with endless flexibility from the entire repository of application-request trace data.

  • Enables intelligent decision-making: Be informed about performance or stability issues in your applications within a few seconds of impact. In addition, you can automate root-cause analysis by using event correlation, performance thresholds, errors, changes, and analysis of service level agreement (SLA) violations.

Essential components

Instana's essential components form the foundation of its observability platform, enabling automatic discovery, data collection, and monitoring.

Agents

The Instana agent is the core component that collects monitoring data from your infrastructure and sends it to the Instana backend. Agents run on your hosts. They discover technologies and automatically deploy technology-specific sensors.

The sensors communicate with the agent about the tracers to inject. They then capture and send all trace data to the agent.

The agent collects and aggregates data from various sensors before it transmits the data to the backend.

The agent automatically and continuously monitors your entire technology stack. You need only one agent per host.

Instana provides different types of agents based on what you want to observe:

  • Host agents: Run on virtual machines, physical hosts, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, VMware Tanzu, or similar platforms to monitor infrastructure and applications.
  • Cloud service agents: Monitor services managed by cloud providers, such as Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) or Azure subscriptions.
  • Serverless agents: Monitor AWS Lambda and other serverless platforms.
  • Website and mobile agents: Monitor websites and mobile applications for user experience.

After you install a host agent, Instana automatically discovers and monitors your applications, services, and infrastructure. To view the metrics for supported technologies, select Infrastructure in the navigation panel, click a specific monitored host, and view the host dashboard with all collected metrics and monitored processes.

For more information, see Installing Instana agents.

Sensors

Sensors are specialized components within agents that monitor specific technologies such as Java, Node.js, databases, message queues, and more. After you install the host agent, most sensors are automatically installed and configured.

Instana sensors are designed to monitor over 200 supported technologies. Some sensors require more configurations to work properly, but most are automatically activated when the host agent detects the corresponding technology.

For the complete list of supported sensors, see Agent sensors and Action sensors.

Backend

The Instana backend receives, processes, stores, and analyzes all monitoring data that the agents collect. It provides the intelligence layer that correlates data, detects anomalies, identifies root causes, and powers the Instana user interface.

The backend architecture consists of multiple components that work together to deliver real-time observability with 1-second granularity. These components handle data ingestion, storage, analysis, and presentation.

For more information about how backend components interact, see Backend components.