Instana released Stan’s Robot Shop, a sample microservice application that can be used as a sandbox to test and learn about microservice architecture, containerized application orchestration and automatic monitoring techniques.

“Instana wanted to help organizations get some hands-on experience with a microservice application and learn how to deploy, monitor and manage one of these complex applications,” said Pete Abrams, Instana COO. “Stan’s Robot Shop is a perfect teacher for DevOps team members that want to better understand orchestration, deployment management, and automated monitoring techniques for today’s complex containerized microservice environments.”

Stan’s Robot Shop is a sample microservice application of an e-Commerce storefront and includes a product catalog, user repository, shopping cart and order pipeline. The technologies used to create this sample microservice application are:

AngularJS (1.x)
Nginx
NodeJS (Express)
Java (Spark Java)
Python (Flask)
Golang
MongoDB
RabbitMQ
Redis
MySQL

Instana’s sample microservice application is small enough to run on a laptop, but is the first sample microservice application to go beyond a “hello world” example. Everything needed to build and run the application, including the Instana monitoring components, is available via the GitHub download. The Instana components provide automatic instrumentation for complete end-to-end tracing, as well as complete visibility into time series metrics for all the included technologies, allowing users to try the features of Instana’s microservice APM solution.

Instana’s AI Powered APM solution automates the monitoring of critical business applications, even those running in cloud, containers, microservices or serverless environments. This automation empowers the optimization of application and service delivery within IT organizations by increasing the speed and efficiency of service and application delivery. The company’s solution leverages automation and AI to automatically monitor, visualize and understand application performance for dynamic containerized microservice applications. Continuous discovery and mapping provides real-time infrastructure and application service visualization, even under constant change.