Instana Becomes First APM Provider to Automatically Detect the Root Cause of Process Crashes

By AIT News Desk On Aug 18, 2020

New Abnormal Termination Detection Built with eBPF and Works for Any Monitored Technology on Linux

Instana, the leading provider of automated application performance management solutions for microservice applications, announced the availability of automatic process crash detection and root cause analysis across the entire set of technologies the company monitors. The new capability makes Instana the first APM solution to automatically detect and determine the root cause of process crashes for any and every process managed by the solution.

“Even though today’s microservice applications are built to dynamically handle individual service crashes, the fact is that abnormal process terminations do lead to poor application performance and other serious operational problems,” said Chris Farrell, technical director and APM strategist at Instana. “Instana’s new automatic crash detection and root cause analysis allows anyone involved with applications to see when and how a crash occurred so that it can be fixed, even issues that are difficult to troubleshoot, increasing the stability of applications and improving the end user experience.”

The new feature, officially called “abnormal process termination detection,” is available today in the production versions of Instana’s SaaS and self-hosted (on-premises) solutions. Included with Instana’s cloud-native and microservices application performance monitoring solution at no additional charge, the new capability works out of the box on each and every technology and platform supported by Instana that runs on Linux machines or containers, working on kernels up to four years old.

Coupling abnormal process termination troubleshooting with Instana’s real-time change detection, immediate pipeline feedback, end-to-end distributed tracing of every request and automatic root cause analysis delivers the most comprehensive set of troubleshooting capabilities available in a single application monitoring solution. All capabilities are delivered at no additional cost with Instana’s application performance management solution.

Unlike traditional APM tools, Instana’s automated Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution discovers all application service components and application infrastructure, including infrastructure such as AWS Lambda, Kubernetes and Docker. Instana automatically deploys monitoring sensors for each part of the application technology stack, traces all application requests and profiles every process – without requiring any human configuration or even application restarts. The solution detects application and infrastructure changes in real-time, adjusting its own models and visualizing the changes and any performance impact in seconds.