Instana

Instana is a fully automated Application Performance Management solution designed for managing microservices and cloud-native applications.

AlertOps and Instana 

AlertOps’ alert management system can be integrated with Instana to receive and respond to critical (predefined status mappings) alarms/alerts through email, SMS, push notification or phone alerts. AlertOps would ensure that the alert would reach the appropriate team by using proper workflows, escalation policies and schedules. Based on your ruleset, incidents can be automatically opened and closed, depending on whether Instana reports a problem or a recovery.  

AlertOps Inbound Integration 

AlertOps would ensure based on notifications received from Instana, that it would always reach out and assign to the correct person/team by utilizing its escalation policies, schedules, and workflow features. AlertOps provides Inbound Integrations to integrate with numerous monitoring, chat and ITSM tools. You can configure an inbound integration for Instana events. 

At a high level this is how the flow looks. You define an API integration in the AlertOps platform by defining settings like Integration Name, Escalation rules, recipient users/groups. Once an integration is defined, a unique API URL is generated. This acts as webhook or the gateway through which events from Instana reach AlertOps and thus an incident/alert is created correspondingly. The API can be defined with various settings like URL mappings, filters, escalations etc. as required. You will have to create a Webhook in Instana to send event information.

Configure Inbound Integration in AlertOps

1. Navigate to Configuration àIntegrations àAdd API Integration à API Integration Detail page.
2. Select Instana.
3. Once you select the integration, you can then specify basic settings like the integration name, escalation policy, names of the recipients/groups for which the alerts must be assigned to.
4. Once you click save, the API Integration will be created, and you will be given a unique URL which acts as the access point and needs to be configured at the source (in this case Instana), to send notifications. You can find the integration you just created, and you can give advanced settings and define various configurations for the alerts to be received and processed. For example, you can define custom conditions as when to open and close alerts based on the response obtained from the API call, filters for the incoming JSON payload etc.
5. Make a note of the API URL, which will be used in Instana, so it calls a HTTP POST request to this URL with the body in JSON format containing the alert specific information. Alerts will be recorded in the ‘Inbound Log’ section table. AlertOps automatically creates an alert when the state contains “OPEN” (as per the definition in the screenshot above). The incident will also be closed automatically when the status ‘CLOSED’ is received.
6. You can similarly define URL mappings as you want, owing to the flexibility provided by AlertOps’ API integrations. You can provide other filters and match with regex as well. You can also test the generated URL

Configure Integration in Instana

Now that we have setup AlertOps with the Instana API Inbound Integration, along with a unique API URL; we can now define a Webhook in Instana to access this API and send out events to AlertOps.

Events need to be created in Instana (or rather an inbuilt event can be picked from Instana) so that they can be attached to an Alert, which is further attached to an Alert Channel Webhook to send out event payload to AlertOps. An example is to create an event when CPU load goes above a value. There are loads of pre-built events and other ways you can define events for your monitoring environment. 

1. In the left navigation pane, go to Settings. In this section, there is another navigation pane in the left and an option “Events and Alerts”. Select “Events”. You can see a lot of pre-built events, descriptions, and types. You can define an alert for any of these or create a new event.