Instana

We moved from Zabbix to Instana. With the rollout of the Instana agents on our servers we more or less out of the box got much better insights into our system landscape and application performance:

- Easy to setup

- Automated discovery

- Coverage of supported technologies

- Detailed infrastructure monitoring

- Flexible configuration of applications used for APM - great for monitoring micro services

Support from Instana is great. Usually you get very fast response on your questions.

When features are not supported by the existing supported technologies there is a good chance to get them implemented or find an alternative solution using generic metric reporters like statsd. Already looking forward for release 191 to get MySQL replication status support.

Special thanks to our Customer Success Manager Zeynep. You are doing a great job and helped us a lot whenever needed.

We are using a lot custom metrics. Configuring events for them is limited. Instana itself is more powerful. The built-in events use more sophisticated rules like changes over a period of time. However they are not available for custom metrics.

Analytics on infrastructure metrics. The comparison tables provided by Instana do not support all metrics. This is a limitation for us.

We are using Instana for both infrastructure monitoring and APM. We run multiple environments of our cloud platform in different data centers including AWS. Instana helped us to get detailed insights into infrastructure metrics with a high resolution. This helped us to better identify infrastructure related issues. The APM capabilities helped us to identify performance issues in production and to improve on a continuous base.

I implemented a provider for terraform based on Instanas Web REST API (https://github.com/gessnerfl/terraform-provider-instana). This allows us to rollout our monitoring configurations together with the infrastructure code and during application rollouts. With this we achieved a consistent monitoring setup across multiple stages and regions.

* Customer success management, just perfect, you're really treated as a customer should be (thanks Z. Y.)

* Highly reactive and skilled support and engineers, any tickets is always quickly and properly handled

* Very interactive development, improvements are very regular, Feature Request taken into account, Instana listens to their customers

* Transparent company, they don't try to hide things, everyone is honest and fair

* Incident / Alerting could be improved, with better scoping

* Not something I literally dislike, but as a quite small customer, I'm worried by the IBM acquisition

Use it, every day, push your team to use it. As any new tool, you need to push yourself to use it to really get the most of its value.

Don't hesitate to give feedback to Instana, via support or via your Customer Success Manager, they are really open to that.

All kind of issues related to infrastructure and application:

* Performance

* Incidents analysis

* Keeping KPI under control

* Releases follow-up

* Kubernetes management

* Debugging (Tracing / Profiling)

Trabalho atualmente conectado o dia todo no Instana e também usei nos meus 3 ultimos trabalhos.

A implantação é muito simples e o tempo para começar a entregar valor é muito rápido.

As demais ferramentas do mercado são muito complexas comparadas ao Instana.

Nosso processo de treinamento e rollout do conhecimento é muito rápido pois a ferramenta é bem intuitiva.

Só tive problemas no passado com implantação em .net muito antigo, mas com PHP e linguagens atualizadas é tudo bem simples.

Utilizei a maioria das ferramentas do mercado.

Gosto muito do Instana, pois é focada em APM e tem um processo de implantação muito simples.

A entrega de valor é momentanea.

O Instana resolve diversos problemas no meu dia a dia.

Utilizo muito para dar visibilidade para os desenvolvedores e corrigir problemas antes do cliente final alarmar.

O Instana exibe as informações de uma forma muito simples e acessivel para qualquer nivel de desenvolvedor.

Tenho um trace completo das request, sem precisar fazer nenhuma manipulação na aplicação.

O processo de IA e identicação de desvios é muito legal e automático.

A simple and clean deployment process, a vast variety of technologies for agent instrumentation, continuous updates, notifications, custom dashboards, third party integrations via rest API, etc. I really like that Instana listens to their users since is easy to request features and get them implemented.

The support process needs more attention. Is not easy to address critical issues in a fast way due to the lack of effectiveness to reach an experienced engineer.

I strongly recommend to test Instana and check how it behaves when monitoring a real environment. This action will pinpoint in a fast way their strengths and weakness.

My teams debug issues on a distributed environment, so getting a quick root cause analysis is vital. The ability to store and recover historical data is relevant as well to understand what has changed and usually generated a service disruption or outage.

We used Instana on the last Black Friday and it was a great experience and helped to identify some issues. The Dev guys use Instana on a daily basis and like it a lot.

It don´t have a infrastructure vision yeat, but the Instana´s guys are worked in this feature!

Some gaps in apps and helps in troubleshooting in production enviroment