From Instana’s inception we have believed that in order for our users to get the most out of an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) platform we needed to lower the barriers of entry and make it easy for users to quickly find the information that is important to them. Instana has developed many technologies, like Application Perspectives, to democratize the use of our platform, enabling individuals on Operations, Development, DevOps, and SRE teams to work autonomously. With this goal in mind, Instana has made it easy for users to personalize summary overviews so they can immediately get to the information they need, without the noise of the entire environment.
In continuing this trend, Instana has created a new personalized summary overview home page that helps users focus on the key entities they care about across all areas of the Instana platform. The new home page comes with five tiles that can be reordered via a simple drag-and-drop to meet the needs of each individual user. The areas are as follows:
- Applications
- Websites
- Infrastructure
- Platforms
- Events
Getting the most of your new home page
Every tile shows the relevant information for each category. By default, the application tile shows the top 5 applications ordered by the number of calls. To customize this, you can ‘star’ the applications that are important to you. The starred applications will then be ‘pinned’ to the top of the list. Starring applications carry over from session to session, so the next time you log into your Instana account you will see the most relevant information to you, at the top.
The Websites and Infrastructure tiles work in a similar fashion. With the Websites tile showing the top 5 websites ordered by page views and the Infrastructure tile showing the top 5 hosts, containers, or processes (based on the selected type) ordered by CPU usage. Both of these tiles also have ‘starring’ capabilities so you can focus your attention in the appropriate places.
The Platforms and Events tiles work in a similar fashion. The Platforms tile collects entities from various platforms like Kubernetes clusters, Cloud Foundry applications, and vSphere data centers. The Events tile shows incidents and issues that occurred in the configured time as shown in the screenshot below.