Instana, a cloud-native provider of artificial intelligence based monitoring for dynamic containerised microservice applications, has extended support to include AWS Lambda, a serverless computing platform, and also announced availability through the AWS Marketplace.
Instana also announced AWS capabilities including the continuous automatic discovery of specific AWS components (including AWS Lambda), the collection of configuration, performance and health information for each platform and application performance across the whole environment (also including AWS Lambda). Additional Instana AWS services now being monitored include: S3 (storage service), SQS (messaging middleware), RDS (native relational database) Dynamo (NoSQL database) and Kinesis (data and video streaming).
Instana's AI-based monitoring solution automates the management of critical business applications including those running in cloud, containers, microservices or serverless environments. The solution uses automation and AI to monitor, visualise and understand application performance for dynamic containerised microservice applications. Continuous discovery and mapping provides real-time infrastructure and application service visualisation.
Mirko Novakovic, Instana CEO, said:
More business applications are operating in a hybrid environment, incorporating traditional monolithic applications, wrappered with a new microservice stack, and using native AWS services. It's now also common to see customers starting to use AWS Lambda Functions for specific microservices as well. This level of complexity requires the ability to monitor the whole environment with a single solution that can give DevOps the required observability to see and address problems, no matter where they reside.
The new AWS Lambda support extends Instana's microservice and container-based application monitoring to include code running in the Amazon Function as a Service (FaaS) platform. The additional platforms supported as part of Instana's monitoring solution extend the power of multi-cloud application monitoring to include both traditional components such as SQS messaging and RDS database instances, as well as non-traditional components like Kinesis (data and video streaming) and AWS Lambda (FaaS).
Instana previously announced enhanced observability of Kubernetes systems providing monitoring capabilities for orchestrated applications, the orchestration system and the interdependencies between them.
Novakovic said:
This announcement is a significant milestone for monitoring orchestrated environments by providing observability where there was previously a blind spot. Kubernetes orchestration creates an environment of extreme abstraction between the application and the infrastructure. This is a huge benefit for enabling high speed delivery of new code, but it creates real challenges with understanding performance issues.
These Kubernetes monitoring features extend Instana's AI-powered application performance monitoring solution to automatically discover, monitor and analyse Kubernetes labels, clusters and pods in addition to the orchestrated application itself. This provides Kubernetes system visibility and contributes additional information to Instana's AI-assisted monitoring and troubleshooting algorithms giving users relational understanding between their orchestrators and application performance. Andre Beunink, director of IT at Trusted Shops said:
While Kubernetes allows us to be more nimble in our operations by rapidly responding and adjusting to changes in our application layout, the new information from Instana helps us to improve our software delivery cycle time while adding and subtracting compute capacity. To reach our goals, we need precise real-time visibility and understanding of what is happening across the complete application / Kubernetes environment. Instana has delivered comprehensive observability. We now can analyse the performance of any of our microservices as we deploy.
With the enhancement, Instana discovers and monitors the Kubernetes stack, using tagging metadata to inform Instana how to model and monitor the services and applications under management.