News

Instana Adds Automatic Tracing for Lambda Functions in Java and Go

• By John K. Waters
• December 10, 2020

Application performance monitoring (APM) and observability solutions provider Instana today announced the availability of automated distributed tracing for Lambda functions written in Java or Go, extending its existing automatic tracing for Python and Node.js features. Instana now claims to be the only solution to provide automatic native tracing of all 4 languages on Lambda.

Lambda expression, which adds closures and related features to the Java language to support programming in multicore environments, was introduced with the Java 8 release.

"Serverless platforms have represented a huge opportunity to minimize compute costs while continuing to deliver high performance mission critical business applications," said Chris Farrell, observability strategist at Instana, in a statement. "Instana's end-to-end distributed tracing, enabled with just a configuration setting, delivers everything needed for observability, monitoring and troubleshooting in serverless environments."

"Observability" has become a hot buzzword this year, elbowing its way into the daily APM lexicon. It's defined as the ability to infer the internal states of a system based on its outputs. In IT, the term refers to the practice of instrumenting systems and applications to collect log data, metrics, and traces. If monitoring gives you the why, observability gives you the why.

Able to operate independently of infrastructure-based APIs like AWS X-Ray, Instana's tracing for Go and Java delivers the same detail, functionality and information as its standard tracing capabilities. Not only does this provide a common methodology that allows better comparison, but also ensures that users have a full picture of transactions as they move across either serverless or standard workloads.

Instana's Enterprise Observability Platform, powered by automated APM, is designed to discover and map all services, infrastructure, and their interdependencies 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 DevOps to optimize application performance, enable innovation and mitigate risk to help them add value and efficiency to the pipeline, the company says.

All distributed traces, regardless of infrastructure type, are included in Instana's Unbounded Analytics, which it claims to be the only product-driven analytics engine that analyzes infrastructure and application monitoring metrics, distributed traces and process profiles together in one place, providing deep analysis of all important data on a single screen to help answer any question about application performance.

Automatic Java and Go Tracing on Lambda is available today on all versions of Instana's APM and Observability platform.