Instana is changing the way that DevOps and IT Operations setup, manage and execute alerting with Instana SmartAlerts, the first system that automates management of IT Alerts based on environmental and situational use cases. Included with the company's automated Application Performance Management solution for Microservice Applications, Instana SmartAlerts uses curated building blocks, called BluePrints, to automate the configuration of alert thresholds and actions.

"The complexity associated with containerized and microservice applications don't just create observability issues, they also impact the ability to effectively manage alerts ," said Chris Farrell, Technical Director and APM Strategist at Instana. "Instana's SmartAlerts provide pre-built configuration modules, called BluePrints, that inject context into alerting and curate critical alerting rules based on technological, process and operational situations." 

SmartAlerts BluePrints contain pre-built metric selection and threshold information, as well as curated analysis of what constitutes an alertable situation. Available as part of Instana's APM solution, SmartAlerts comes with out-of-the-box BluePrints for typical IT and DevOps situations such as identifying slow services or websites. The only thing for the user to configure is the scope of where to apply those checks, like a URL or Service name.

"It's important to provide the best possible experience for customers using critical applications such as eCommerce," said Janek Wonner, DevOps Engineer at Conrad. "Instana's SmartAlerts brings the automation and ease of use we've come to expect from their application monitoring into our alerting system, helping us efficiently deliver higher application performance and customer satisfaction."

Unlike other APM solutions, Instana fully automates the entire lifecycle of application monitoring including application discovery and mapping, monitoring sensor and agent deployment, and application infrastructure health monitoring. Whenever an application or infrastructure change occurs within dynamic applications, Instana recognizes the change in real time, instantly adjusting its application service maps, monitoring thresholds and health dashboards.

The SmartAlerts system builds on Instana's tenets of automation, ease of use and minimal configuration by humans. Out-of-the-box BluePrints provide fully specified alerting systems for the most desirable alerting use cases, such as website issues - with minimal required configuration. Users can create new alerts directly from dashboards using the Unbounded Analytics filtering engine and the new SmartAlerts Wizard which includes any existing SmartAlerts BluePrints.

Instana SmartAlerts comes with the company's APM solutions and is available for use today. Key BluePrints are already available for instant zero-touch alerting. Learn more at https://instana.com/alerting.