Instana Releases Context Guide, First Graphical UI Representation of an Application System Model
CHICAGO, April 7, 2020 – Instana announced the availability of the Instana Context Guide, providing GUI-based access to the company’s underlying system model called the Dynamic Graph. With the release of Context Guide, Instana becomes the first APM solution to provide a graphical navigator through managed applications’ service architecture.
“A major challenge of modern Dev and Ops teams is the ability to see and understand what’s going on in complex application eco-systems,” said Chris Farrell, Instana Technical Director and APM Strategist. “Instana’s new Context Guide allows any user to get an instant visualization of the upstream and downstream dependencies for any object or service in the application, without requiring any training or technical knowledge.”
Unlike traditional APM tools, Instana’s automated Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution discovers all application service components and application infrastructure, including Cloud infrastructure such as Azure, orchestration infrastructure like Kubernetes and Docker, application services and DevOps processes. Instana automatically deploys monitoring sensors for each part of the application technology stack and traces all application requests – without requiring any human configuration or even application restarts. The solution detects application and infrastructure changes in real-time, adjusting its own models and visualizing the changes and impacts to performance in seconds.
A key part of that automation is enabled through the company’s Dynamic Graph, an advanced uber-model that includes dependencies, individual infrastructure health profiles, configuration information and performance information – all updated in real-time as the system changes. The release of Context Guide marks the first time that users can actually use the dynamic graph for themselves to navigate across the application and infrastructure visualizations that are the heart of Instana’s Application Performance Monitoring solution.
“Container orchestration and service-oriented architecture have helped us improve on scalability and reliability of our applications for our customers. But they’ve also introduced more complexity which makes it difficult to get the visibility we want for effectively monitoring performance,” said Tobias Otto, Technical Lead at INFORM, GmbH. “While Instana has always helped us deal with that complexity, the new Context Guide allows us to actually navigate through it in an easy and intuitive way. The new Context Guide didn’t need any introduction; people just started using it, making it even easier to look at the entire nature of an individual problematic application component, from downstream dependencies to the application infrastructure with a few clicks.”
The Dynamic Graph is a key component of Instana’s automated and AI-powered features. More than just a model, the dynamic graph is an inventory of all individual entities, configuration data, performance metrics, dependencies and change logs – all wrapped up in one – and with every other entity in the system.
The latest in a series of product releases designed to help Dev and Ops teams optimize performance of their applications, today’s announcement provides deeper information, specifically situational context, about each service, relationships between services and the overall application. With Context Guide, now users can quickly traverse from user requests to slow transactions to problematic software or infrastructure with just a few clicks.
You can learn more about Instana and Context Guide at https://instana.com.
About Instana
As the leading provider of Automatic Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solutions for microservices, Instana has developed the automatic monitoring and AI-based analysis DevOps needs to manage the performance of modern applications. Instana is the only APM solution that automatically discovers, maps and visualizes microservice applications without continuous additional engineering. Customers using Instana achieve operational excellence and deliver better software faster. Visit https://www.instana.com to learn more.
Source: Instana
