Instana announced multiple new features and capabilities with its cloud-native application monitoring solution to help enterprises manage their mission critical applications more effectively.

The new capabilities include UX improvements, operational enhancements, and new monitoring sensors for enterprise technologies.

“As the line blurs between enterprise and cloud-native microservice applications, Dev and Ops teams need a wider range of technology support and enterprise-level features,” said Chris Farrell, Technical Director and APM Strategist at Instana. “The set of capabilities Instana announced today will provide organizations with the visibility and ease-of-use they need to keep pace with continuing digital transformation and innovation.”

The new features Instana launched include a more robust enterprise user experience, monitoring and tracing for complex enterprise platforms and operational enhancements for large organizations:

- Custom Dashboards

- NGINX Tracing

- Redis Enterprise Monitoring Sensor

- IBM MQ Monitoring Sensor

- Role Based Access Control

IT organizations running enterprise scale environments have operational requirements for a larger number and broader set of users. Instana’s new dashboards and role-based access are both designed to provide all users with the exact details they need without having to get training on the nuances of Instana’s data and user interfaces.

As organizations monitor cloud-native applications with bigger teams and more stakeholders involved, Custom Dashboards give users the ability to build personalized dashboards based on a variety of UI widgets and settings such as charts, markdowns and time zone, allowing them to visualize any data on a single screen.

With the growing complexity of infrastructure and IT landscape, it is increasingly difficult for users to cut through the swaths of data and noise and focus on the exact information they need. With Role Based Access Control, organizations have the ability to create and manage groups with corresponding permissions and access areas. This provides the control to reduce the number of visible Application Perspectives (unique dynamic groupings by application, individual service owners and teams), services, and events by team so that each user has a tailored view of exactly what they need to see.

Instana’s APM solution has also added NGINX tracing capabilities, which automatically integrate with Instana End User Monitoring (EUM) to natively extract tracing requests passing through NGINX, removing the blind spot of the NGINX proxy and gathering performance and latency metrics of services running inside and behind NGINX.

New Instana enterprise monitoring sensors include IBM MQ and Redis Enterprise. For IBM MQ, a major platform in legacy messaging systems, Instana’s solution now collects metrics directly from IBM MQ to enhance the contextual detail required to fully understand the health and performance of messages, applications and the IBM MQ system, itself.

Additionally, Instana’s APM solution now monitors Redis Enterprise Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) at the individual component and application level. These KPIs are used for real-time health monitoring of each instance and cluster and leveraged to understand the Redis Enterprise performance within overall applications. The end result is the ability to be alerted the moment there is a negative impact from users of a business critical application.

Instana’s automated Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution discovers all application service components and application infrastructure, including infrastructure such as AWS Lambda, Kubernetes and Docker. Instana automatically deploys monitoring sensors for each part of the application technology stack, traces all application requests and profiles every process – 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 any performance impact in seconds.

The new features and sensors are available in both the SaaS and on-prem versions of Instana’s Application Performance Management solution.