Instana announced the availability of the Instana Context Guide, providing GUI-based access to the company’s underlying system model called the Dynamic Graph.
“A major challenge of modern Dev and Ops teams is the ability to see and understand what’s going on in complex application eco-systems,” said Chris Farrell, Instana Technical Director and APM Strategist. “Instana’s new Context Guide allows any user to get an instant visualization of the upstream and downstream dependencies for any object or service in the application, without requiring any training or technical knowledge.”
Instana’s automated Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution discovers all application service components and application infrastructure, including Cloud infrastructure such as Azure, orchestration infrastructure like Kubernetes and Docker, application services and DevOps processes. Instana automatically deploys monitoring sensors for each part of the application technology stack and traces all application requests – 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 impacts to performance in seconds.
A key part of that automation is enabled through the company’s Dynamic Graph, an advanced uber-model that includes dependencies, individual infrastructure health profiles, configuration information and performance information – all updated in real-time as the system changes. The release of Context Guide marks the first time that users can actually use the dynamic graph for themselves to navigate across the application and infrastructure visualizations that are the heart of Instana’s Application Performance Monitoring solution.
The Dynamic Graph is a key component of Instana’s automated and AI-powered features. More than just a model, the dynamic graph is an inventory of all individual entities, configuration data, performance metrics, dependencies and change logs – all wrapped up in one – and with every other entity in the system.
The latest in a series of product releases designed to help Dev and Ops teams optimize performance of their applications, this announcement provides deeper information, specifically situational context, about each service, relationships between services and the overall application. With Context Guide, now users can quickly traverse from user requests to slow transactions to problematic software or infrastructure with just a few clicks.
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