Instana – an interesting monitoring vendor but how about some truth in marketing?

I received some information the other day about a company that has just raised a truckload of cash (some $20 million) from well-respected VC firm Accel. I’ve had a bit to do with some of Accel’s investments in the past and they are well-respected in the infrastructure space, so I was interested to hear what they’ve picked up here. Instana is, according to the breathless press release:

the first monitoring solution to apply both automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to fully automate all aspects of application performance management (APM)

The company has raised $27 million to date, from Target Partners as well as Accel and so I figured there would have been a heap of engineering work done which had really built something unique. Instana is selling itself as a new way of doing monitoring, one that is focused on container and cloud technologies. Apparently, Instana is meeting enterprises worldwide that have become frustrated with the limitations of current solutions’ abilities to keep up with the high rate of application change, visualize containerized environments, understand performance and analyze impacts.

Which is interesting, since pretty much every monitoring vendor created post the advent of the cloud (companies such as NewRelic and Datadog, for instance) would suggest that they, too, fulfill this new and different need. Oh well, maybe those other guys missed something.

I figured the answer was in the positioning. You see, whereas other vendors talk about their solutions being all about application monitoring, Instana calls itself a management vendor. There is a significant difference there. At least in my over-simplified view of things, monitoring is about delivering dashboards, alerts and (like I wrote about Datadog the other day) some predictive insights about what might happen.

Management, on the other hand, is all about taking actions from an event. It’s about actually connecting some blip in application performance with some automated action to right the wrong. Closing the loop, as it were. Indeed, alongside a post I wrote earlier this week I commented that:

Firstly, I really want my monitoring vendor to learn and tell me when a problem is likely to arise rather than reactive tell me when one exists. Secondly, I don’t actually want to be notified that it’s found a problem, I want it to do whatever it takes to put that problem right. Automatically.

So, judging by the tone of the release, Instana had heard my request and were moving on from monitoring to management. Was it a Eureka! moment? Alas not, it seems the hype doesn’t quite meet the reality. I quizzed an Instana staffer about the actual meaning of the word “management” as Instana uses it and was told that””:

Instana isn’t spinning up or down servers, but it is able to automate the discovery of infrastructure – servers (added or removed), containers, microservices, etc. – as part of the application monitoring and management. The discovery happens within seconds, helping operations teams know right away if there’s an issue in a production application. Instana creates a dynamic graph or internal data model of the entire application: all the physical and logical components, their technology components, dependencies and configuration. The graph updates in real-time as changes are made, enabling teams to use artificial intelligence for precise troubleshooting, prediction and problem resolution. When Instana uses the term “automation,” it is focusing on automating application insight and understanding. In this way, the user of Instana never needs to manually configure the monitoring solution. Instana automates the discovery of the application under management, and automatically understands the application’s health.

Sorry for being grumpy, but this is ridiculous. Of course, monitoring should be automatic. it’s not like I should have to ping every individual server every five seconds to see if it is alive, any monitoring solution, by the very definition of the word “monitor” should be constantly listening for application performance and outages. Saying that simply meeting the definition of a word is somehow revolutionary goes far beyond gilding the lily.

As for Instana’s statement about being the first APM vendor to leverage artificial intelligence. Well, firstly I’d argue about what people call artificial intelligence. That slight quibble aside, my second and more substantive criticism lies in the fact that Instana’s competitors – Datadog and NewRelic, also claim to predict, in advance, performance issues through the use of AI or machine learning.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so grumpy and should just accept that marketers, by definition, spray the world with copious quantities of spin and BS. But it does annoy me. Instana may be a really great product, but by suggesting that it’s something that it most certainly isn’t, it runs the risk of turning people off before they even take a look.