The journey to cloud is one that most of my customers are on. Some are going the whole way and developing all their applications in cloud-native, containerised environments, while others are moving virtual machines onto the cloud (ie, moving them from their own data centres to infrastructure hosted by cloud providers) and others have the plan but haven’t moved anything yet. In general, all customers will have a mix of environments, so being able to manage a hybrid environment is important.
Cloud environments are very different to the old monolithic way of doing things. The components making up your cloud solution are distributed across various locations in the cloud. So it is more difficult to understand what is giving the problem when there are performance problems reported by your end-user.
Right from the beginning of this journey to cloud, it is important to observe, monitor and optimise the cloud environment. IBM has recently acquired Instana, which has the perfect product for this scenario. To start with, it is cloud-native itself and can quickly show value in the SaaS (software as a service) or on-premises versions.
With the acquisition of Instana, IBM offers industry-leading, AI-powered automation capabilities to manage the complexity of modern applications that span hybrid cloud landscapes. Clients get a leading enterprise observability platform to drive automated remediation, powered by Instana’s contextualised data with metrics, traces, profiles and dependency mapping. In addition, existing IBM monitoring clients will have a path forward to preserve their existing investment and take advantage of the modern observability features of Instana.
Instana has a very short time to value and is intuitive to use. You can easily see the end-to-end performance of your environment and easily drill in to see where the problem is. Complex cloud-native environments are simplified and it allows you to understand the health of your infrastructure, containers and orchestration with minimal effort.
The GUI (graphical user interface) is easy to navigate and shows graphs and dependency maps that assist in identifying visually where the performance issues are located.
Instana complements the IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps (artificial intelligence for IT operations), which brings AI into the mix as well as providing event management. The combination of the two products gives a powerful, operational and proactive solution to you.
At the end of the day, it is all about observability of your cloud environment. Instana is an application performance management tool that allows you to observe what is going on in your cloud environment – quickly and easily.
If you want to know about IBM’s observability with Instana, please drop me, Birgit Smythe, an e-mail on bsmythe@envisage.email. We at Envisage are able to assist with all things related to management and monitoring of IT environments.
Envisage is a Gold member of IBM PartnerWorld, IBM’s partner programme that empowers businesses with the tools and resources they need to help transform clients into industry leaders.
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