Instana announced the availability of its Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution with a GitOps enabled agent.

With the release, Instana’s agent now automatically supports Git-based configuration management across any number of hosts.

“Updating and configuring agents in production environments is a tedious and time consuming effort for organizations today. Of course, the more agents that are running, the more tedious the task,” said Chris Farrell, Instana Technical Director and APM Strategist. “With this latest unique capability, Instana is giving more control to users while reducing manual effort, enabling them to manage agent configuration automatically during agent startup and reboot, and version pin the Instana agent to via their Git repository of preference.”

Traditional monitoring solutions give organizations a choice of using static agents or giving up version control. Instana has allowed both options, but now makes it easier for clients using Git repositories. The Instana agent supports Git-based configuration management, delivering version pinning control for specific hosts, automatic configuration updates fetched on agent startup and reboot, the flexibility to turn this feature on and off at will, and the ability to map different groups of host agents to Git branches based on the environment that is being monitored.

In addition to manual agent configuration being a complex and time-consuming process, it also introduces a high risk of error that could break the monitoring of critical systems. Instana’s GitOps enabled host agent reduces that risk, leading to fewer configuration errors while providing the option for easy rollback if an update causes a problem. With this novel capability, Instana’s agent delivers improved customer experience and more control for users, allowing them to keep the latest version of the agent when it is most convenient.

Instana’s automated APM solution discovers all application service components and application infrastructure, including Cloud infrastructure such as AWS and Lambda, orchestration infrastructure like Kubernetes and Docker, application services and DevOps processes. 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.