AUTOMATIC Discovery & Monitoring - Main feature that sold Instana to us
What do you like best?
Like i mentioned on the title, the automatic discovery & monitoring is the main feature that sold instana to us.
This tech is solid and reasonably thorough. It is the most helpful feature especially when you have too many different services/microservices in the ecosystem and have very limited number of humans who can configure/maintain. It feels great when your new services automatically shows up wth relevant metrics in the call tree. Analytics(Calls/Traces search) are supremely flexible, you can search your calls in your own way..For eg:You can search for calls/traces with the message routingkey and get the full call graph.
The provided call graph is thorough and also tracks rabbitmq message routes to completion with very less configuration. Integration with graphana, source code lookups, profiles, etc. .
Last but not least, the support we received from the account manager ted, was great. He was always available and provided very constructive recommendations whenever we had any hiccups with the tool. I am sure there are many other things that i can list in this section, leaving at this for brevity and time.
What do you dislike?
Instana has matured a lot, had some bugs with user interface. I could see the instana team is working hard to improve the user interface experience and must say it has come a long way. I can understand the UX challenge especially with the sheer amount of data that are being captured.
I personally feel that the sheer volume of data available about the system is fantastic and great but it can overwhelm some initially, if they are attached so much to other APM tools.
While i like the flexible search, there were some bugs with boundary conditions like the same call would not show up if an expanded time is selected as compared to limited time frame selection. This may have been fixed, but i made a point myself to search only with as minimal timeframe as much possible of any specific event. Instana is continually improving infact probably improving everyday as I see new versions being rolled out very frequently.
Summary: Instana is not the most perfect but certainly the benefits FAR outweighs the potential flaws/limitations.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
production root cause analysis, errors analysis, automatic outage alerts, metrics capture integration with graphana etc.
