IBM Instana Foundations

IBM Instana helps in managing application performance in real-time and maximizing uptime with automated full-stack observability. This course provides information about the architecture and functionality of IBM Instana to help you understand the value proposition. You learn essential user interface techniques, creating application perspectives, and how to use dashboards to monitor the services. In addition, this course teaches about distributed tracing and the AutoTrace feature that helps in quickly tracing issues down to the root cause. You also learn the differences between alerts, issues, and incidents and how to create alerts to notify team members when certain criteria are met. You also learn how the Smart Alerts simplify the alerting configuration. IBM Instana automatically discovers, maps, and monitors all services and infrastructure components, providing complete visibility across every layer of your application stack. The course also teaches about Unbounded Analytics, Synthetic Monitoring, Log Management, and custom dashboards. Built on a foundation of real-time granularity and high-fidelity data, IBM Instana delivers actionable insights that your IT teams can leverage to enhance application performance and drive operational efficiency and reliability.

After completing this course, you should be able to:

• Describe the purpose of IBM Instana
• Check to ensure that all the services are enabled and running
• Use Instana user interface features and dashboards
• Navigate the Infrastructure map, perform Dynamic Focus Queries, and compare services using the Comparison table
• Create application perspectives as well as analyze services and endpoints
• Use the context information provided by the Dynamic Graph to navigate from services to infrastructure and back
• Track down issues to the root cause using the dashboards, analytics, and the tracing features
• Use incidents, issues, and alerts to help observe a system
• Create custom events, alert channels, alerts, and custom dashboards
• Configure Smart Alerts and Custom Payloads
• Create Synthetic Monitoring tests and related Smart Alerts

System Administrators, DevOps, App Developers

• Fundamental understanding of distributed applications
• Knowledge of Linux is a plus

Units:

• Unit 1: Observability basics
• Unit 2: Introduction to IBM Instana
• Unit 3: Infrastructure View and Dynamic Focus Queries
• Unit 4: Applications and Services
• Unit 5: Analytics and Tracing
• Unit 6: Events and Alerts
• Unit 7: Custom Dashboards
• Unit 8. Synthetic Monitoring
• Unit 9: Course summary