With the release of Context Guide, Instana becomes the first APM solution to provide a graphical navigator through managed applications’ service architecture. 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.

• Unlike traditional APM tools, 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 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.
• 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.

“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.”