Advanced Monitoring & Observability for IBM Power Systems with Instana
It’s been a few months since IBM announced a definitive agreement to acquire Instana, an application performance monitoring and observability company.
“The combination of the Instana platform and IBM Watson AIOps capabilities extends and enriches IBM’s AI-powered automation portfolio to deliver more advanced capabilities to help our clients move from reactive to proactive management of IT operations.” — Pratik Gupta, CTO, IBM Hybrid Cloud Management & AI Powered Automation
I wanted to take a moment and share some perspective on what this key partnership means for our IBM Power Systems customers. Instana has been built from the ground up to take advantage of new technologies like Kubernetes and cloud-native services to fill critical gaps. Instana brings a wealth of innovative capabilities such as comprehensive collection of application tracing, automatic construction of log relationships, metrics, simplified instrumentation and so much more.
At a very high level, Instana’s architecture consists of a management dashboard (can run on-prem in your data center or as a cloud-based SaaS solution) and agents that collect data from your underlying infrastructure. As of this writing, Instana supports host agents for AIX and Linux on Power, as shown below.
Installing the agents just takes a few minutes. Once they’re running, you can see all sorts of interesting metrics in your Instana dashboard:
Instana not only collects information about compute nodes, but also has an extensive set of application discovery and monitoring capabilities. As you can see in the example above, Instana automatically discovered that I had an instance of MariaDB installed and running inside of a container — that’s deep introspection at its finest!
Best of all, it’s easy to give Instana a test drive today — just hop over to the website and sign up for the free trial. It’s entirely SaaS-based, so it just takes a few minutes and you’ll be on your way to installing agents and looking at all kinds of interesting metrics!
From an IBM Power Systems perspective, we’re very excited about this partnership and the future of hybrid cloud monitoring and AI-driven insights for the platform! For more details about this partnership, check out this blog post by Pratik Gupta, CTO, IBM Hybrid Cloud Management & AI Powered Automation.
