KedronUK partners with Instana to future proof their customers APM requirements

KedronUK is a leading network and Application Performance Management (APM) consultancy. They provide their customers with increased visibility and control across their networks and applications infrastructure by combining leading technology, knowledge and service.

Their customers are adopting microservice and serverless technologies as a means to increase the speed at which they can deploy new application functionality and code fixes to their users. The increased speed of delivery and the highly dynamic nature of this new environment brings challenges in maintaining visibility into both overall application performance and individual service performance. KedronUK and their customers found that traditional APM tools required too much manual intervention to keep them in synchronisation with the rapid changes in the production environment. This resulted in critical services not being monitored, additionally, the traditional pricing models of legacy APM tools does not work well with microservices; they are too slow and too expensive.

KedronUK decided to re-evaluate the tooling they offer along with their professional services. Ultimately they selected Instana and signed a strategic partnership.

Why Instana

“With regards to microservices, the main challenges that customers were telling us about with their current APM approach, is that it is too manual to get the dynamic visibility required (which often meant critical services are not being monitored at all) and even then, the pricing models didn’t work – it was too slow and expensive.

KedronUK have spent 9 months reviewing this challenge and thoroughly testing technologies. As a result have signed a strategic partnership with Instana.”

Automation is key to gaining speed through the Continuous Integration / Continuous Development (CI/CD) lifecycle loop. Our customers are already using automation at every stage of the CI/CD process, except for monitoring. Traditional APM tools require too much manual intervention to stay in synchronisation with the ever-changing environment of microservices architectures. Instana brings AI powered automation to APM enabling your DevOps team to concentrate on writing and running code rather than manually configuring monitoring agents, building dashboards and editing health rules. Instana automates it all:

• Automatic discovery and monitoring of your application services, endpoints and infrastructure
• Continuous visualisation and performance analysis of your full application stack
• Every request traced end to end
• Automatic root cause analysis

Source: DORA 2018 report

Automation the primary enabler for your DevOps organisation to achieve “Elite” levels of software delivery performance. Instana’s automatic monitoring provides immediate feedback on the quality of the latest deployment with 1-second resolution data delivered with only a few seconds lag. Instana’s automatic root cause analysis cuts through alert storm noise to give your DevOps team a clear indication of what needs to be fixed or rolled back.

Kubernetes Insight

Kubernetes is the automation platform for running the microservices that make up your applications in production. The huge benefit provided by its automation is tainted by added complexity and reduced operational visibility with all resources abstracted away. The high level of disconnect from the application code to the hardware it’s running on makes traditional infrastructure monitoring less critical. Consider the levels of abstraction in Kubernetes:

code -> container -> pod -> deployment -> node -> virtual machine

It is considerably more important to understand how the microservices and overarching applications are performing and if they are meeting their desired SLOs. An understanding of the overall health of the Kubernetes backplane is also essential to ensure the highest levels of service quality for your application.

Instana’s Dynamic Graph continually tracks over time each entity’s relationship to every other entity. Therefore at any point in time Instana knows where a service was running, what it calls and what calls it. This includes the complex relationships inside Kubernetes.

Achieve Elite Software Delivery Performance with KedronUK and Instana

Get your CI/CD pipeline to Elite levels of efficiency.

Contact us today to see how Instana gives you immediate visibility into your microservices application.