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Instana Launches New Tracing and Monitoring Features

Custom Dashboards, Role Based Access Control, NGINX Tracing, and Monitoring Sensors for Redis Enterprise and IBM MQ

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.

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Instana Launches New Tracing and Monitoring Features

Custom Dashboards, Role Based Access Control, NGINX Tracing, and Monitoring Sensors for Redis Enterprise and IBM MQ

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.

The Latest

While IT leaders are becoming more comfortable and adept at balancing workloads across on-premises, colocation data centers and the public cloud, there's a key component missing: connectivity, according to the 2025 State of the Data Center Report from CoreSite ...

A perfect storm is brewing in cybersecurity — certificate lifespans shrinking to just 47 days while quantum computing threatens today's encryption. Organizations must embrace ephemeral trust and crypto-agility to survive this dual challenge ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 14, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud network observability... 

While companies adopt AI at a record pace, they also face the challenge of finding a smart and scalable way to manage its rapidly growing costs. This requires balancing the massive possibilities inherent in AI with the need to control cloud costs, aim for long-term profitability and optimize spending ...

Telecommunications is expanding at an unprecedented pace ... But progress brings complexity. As WanAware's 2025 Telecom Observability Benchmark Report reveals, many operators are discovering that modernization requires more than physical build outs and CapEx — it also demands the tools and insights to manage, secure, and optimize this fast-growing infrastructure in real time ...

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...