How Does the Combination of Instana (APM) & Turbonomic (ARM) Benefit Our App?
The importance of application performance is a fact that everyone accepts, but what do we think when it comes to “efficiency”? Why is the performance & efficiency balance important in your observability strategy?
Costs are critical to your overall company strategy. It can describe the success of a project or the entire company. So at what cost is high performance important?
The most important goal of deploying observability solutions is to improve the reliability, performance and usability of applications. But can we ensure that we do not overuse the infrastructure to ensure good performance?
Using observability we can find the root cause of problems, but how do we determine exactly which infrastructure component we need to extend to improve application performance? How can we automate infrastructure changes to do this?
These questions both provide insight into how to track efficiency and performance, and contribute to teams and companies how to deploy solutions that use IT infrastructure efficiently.
We can find the answers to these questions with an example. To illustrate, we need an application performance management tool (APM) and an Application Resource Management tool (ARM). IBM Instana as APM solution and IBM Turbonomic as ARM solution will accompany us in this scenario.
The APM solution will identify bottlenecks and performance issues, identify SLO, and proceed with similar actions.
ARM will determine infrastructure usage, comparison of cloud service provider prices.
The screenshot below shows application performance on APM. We can see that performance metrics such as latency, error rate, and traffic are in good shape.
Let’s dig deeper to see if the SLO is met (which is why it’s really important to identify SLOs.)
SLOs are also good as seen in the image below but it is important to identify the problem and that we have reached a peak on the charts.
We can determine exactly when it happened by navigating through Instana Analytics:
By digging deeper into a particular transaction, we can see where the problem happens.
Using Instana, we identified the performance issue, which is exactly an ongoing query on a specific server. So, can we say that we have identified the source problem? Not yet.
ARM is the solution we need to identify the source problem. Turbonomic will help us identify two important points; efficiency of IT resources used by the application and scaling IT resources to improve the performance of the application.
In the image;
Application Perspective -> Business Application ile,
Endpoints -> Business Transactions ile,
Service -> service ile
Süreçler -> application component ile ilişkilendirilmiştir:
Let’s see the same application now in Turbonomic. As you can see in the image below, data centers and infrastructure components through the Business Application show the status of the components in yellow, green, and red in terms of efficiency, and on the left we have the topology created by Turbonomic. On the right, we can see some pending transactions:
Click on the pending actions, and we will see the full list (29 actions) of possible improvements to the infrastructure. These actions will help save 129 GB VMEM and 20 vCPU for this application only. If we accept actions that can be changed automatically, we have an application with the same performance but using less IT resources.
Regarding the performance improvements, Turbonomic also suggested some actions as we can see in the image below. Turbonomic also takes SLO from Instana to compare and check when SLO is violated.
The combination of Instana and Turbonomic helps you define Observability strategies that are not only about performance but also about efficiency. It allows you to offer high performance and efficient solutions.
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Let us support you in reaching your Observability goals with Instana APM and Turbonomic ARM!
