Instana announced the availability of the integration of data from both the W3C Trace Context and User Timing APIs.
With the release, Instana automatically identifies custom W3C events and consumes them, with no code changes required.
“Developers and Operations staff need maximum observability to work as effectively as possible,” said Chris Farrell, Instana Technical Director and APM Strategist. “By combining data from proprietary sources and W3C User Timing and Trace Context, Instana provides the best of both visibility worlds, a powerful way to provide maximum visibility with minimum effort.”
Instana’s implementation of support for W3C User Timing API automatically collects all pre-existing W3C User Timing events, without developers needing to add their own JavaScript API calls to get the events into their analytics platforms. Similar to other performance entities inside Instana’s solutions, W3C User Timing API is made available for analysis in Instana’s Unbounded Analytics™ engine, allowing patterns across multiple profiles to be discovered and analyzed collaboratively.
“The W3C Distributed Tracing Working Group via the Trace Context specification defines the format and semantic of distributed trace context propagation, enabling an integrated experience for users of various tracing tools, libraries, and platforms, while leaving space for innovation and experimentation,” said Sergey Kanzhelev, W3C Distributed Tracing Working Group Editor and Co-Chair. “Standards like Trace Context are increasingly important with the rise of cloud computing and modern platforms, especially as application development moves to a new level of abstraction where standards provide building blocks enabling compatibility and interoperability of different application components, simplifying the development process and speeding up time-to-market.”
Instana’s support for W3C Trace Context includes correlating traces with AutoTrace, Instana’s automated distributed tracing technology. Every trace, regardless of origin, is then available in the Instana Analytics Engine (called Unbounded Analytics), allowing developers and operations to get to the root of any issue and easily pass contextual information from one transaction to next across different tracing sources.
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.
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