News

Instana Adds Kubernetes Support

• By John K. Waters
• November 17, 2020

Application performance monitoring (APM) and observability solutions provider Instana today announced that users of its APM solution now have the ability to deploy its on-prem, self-hosted solutions via Kubernetes.

Earlier this year, the company migrated its self-hosted solution to Docker, which makes it easier for customers to update. The latest upgrade allows organizations to use the same process to deploy and update Instana application monitoring as they use to deploy the applications Instana manages.

"Instana is proud of our examples of leading the charge for monitoring applications running on Kubernetes," said Chris Farrell, APM and observability strategist at Instana, in a statement. "The ability to deploy and update Instana's self-hosted back-end using Kubernetes allows ops teams to streamline their software deployment and automate their on-demand scaling for the most efficient operations of performance management software."

Available today for the self-hosted on-prem version of Instana's back-end, the new deployment option allows DevOps teams to deploy and update their performance management software with the same tools they use to provision and manage the infrastructure of the applications Instana manages. 

Instana announced the new capabilities at the start of the KubeCon + Cloud Native event, the CNCF's flagship conference, taking place online this week.

One benefit of using Kubernetes to manage on-prem Instana, the company underscored, is the ability to automatically "scale on the fly," without human interaction or having to roll out additional compute resources. "This makes it easier for operations teams to deploy the management tool across more applications," the company said.

The Chicago-based Instana is a leading provider of APM and observability solutions for cloud-native and microservice applications. The company's Enterprise Observability Platform, powered by automated APM, was designed to discover and map all services, infrastructure, and their inter-dependencies automatically. Instana ingests all observability metrics, traces each request, profiles every process and updates application dependency maps in real time to deliver the context and actionable feedback needed by Dev+Ops to optimize application performance, enable innovation and mitigate risk to help them add value and efficiency to the pipeline.

"Observability" comes from the field of engineering. It's defined as the ability to infer the internal states of a system based on its outputs. In IT, it's the practice of instrumenting systems and applications to collect log data, metrics, and traces to provide actionable insights into what's going on in a system.