Announcing the integration between IBM Concert and Instana: Streamlining application observability, risk and resilience

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, application owners and site reliability engineers (SREs) face the mounting challenge of managing complexity, maintaining performance and addressing vulnerabilities across hybrid, multi-cloud environments. We’re thrilled to share the new integration of IBM® Concert® and IBM Instana®, a combined solution that bridges critical gaps in observability and application management, delivering automated insights and streamlined processes that prioritize your efforts to minimize the risk of application vulnerabilities.

The challenge: Manually correlating source code, runtime environments and vulnerability assessments has been a persistent pain point among application owners. This time-consuming and error-prone task not only impact app owner productivity, but it also hinders their ability to quickly address vulnerabilities and maintain application performance.

The solution: The Concert-Instana integration introduces Concert’s updated “Arena View,” which provides an intuitive visualization of the entire application topology to analyze vulnerabilities across your applications and runtime environments. By correlating source code repositories, images, deployed clusters, namespaces, runtime environments and vulnerabilities, application owners can:

• Quickly assess actual risk and identify critical vulnerabilities.
• Gain actionable insights into system behavior and performance.
• Automatically evaluate each CVE using multiple risk metrics, including CVSS, network exposure, asset criticality and global evidence of exploitation.
• Eliminate guesswork, enabling more strategic prioritization on how your SRE team addresses vulnerabilities.

This enhanced integration empowers app owners to prioritize vulnerabilities based on their potential impact and urgency for remediation.

The Challenge: SREs often struggle with manually correlating Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) to runtime environments and applications. This cumbersome process becomes especially challenging during high-pressure incidents, increasing the risk of errors and incomplete patching.

The Solution: The Concert-Instana integration provides SREs with a detailed, centralized view of CVEs and their status within runtime environments. This level of visibility allows teams to:

• Deploy patches effectively across all affected systems.
• Minimize the risks of unaddressed vulnerabilities.
• View the same CVE risk assessment set by the app owners in IBM Concert
• Optimize the security and resilience of applications with less manual effort.

By automating these processes, SREs can focus their time on ensuring system reliability rather than juggling reactive tasks.

The synergy of IBM Concert and Instana is more than just a technical enhancement—it's an integral transformation into how teams manage complex, cloud-native applications. Together, they deliver:

• Unified Insights: App owners and SREs gain a shared view of system performance, vulnerabilities and dependencies.
• Proactive Management: Automated correlation and AI-powered recommendations ensure issues are addressed before they escalate.
• Enhanced Productivity: Both roles benefit from reduced manual effort, allowing teams to focus on innovation and strategic goals.

By integrating these two powerful solutions, organizations can streamline observability, ensure application security and boost operational efficiency, all while minimizing risk. The result? A more secure, resilient and productive IT ecosystem.

Ready to experience the benefits? See how IBM’s integrated solutions can transform your approach to application management today. Sign up for a free 30-day trial.