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Instana

Overview​

Causely connects to IBM Instana Observability through a locally deployed mediation layer. The mediation layer reads only the signals needed from Instana, discovers topology, and detects symptoms in your environment.

The mediation layer converts Instana signals into a compact stream of symptoms and topology deltas, then sends only those distilled insights to Causely's causal reasoning engine (CRE) for analysis.

The engine continuously infers causes, evaluates blast radius across services, endpoints, databases, and SLOs, and provides context-rich explanations with guided remediation so responders move directly from detection to resolution.

Key capabilities:​

  • Automatic causal inference pinpointing cause and risk in real time. Causely’s CRE continuously ingests Instana signals to pinpoint causes of service degradations and failures, surfacing emerging risks before they become incidents.
  • Automatic impact analysis and blast radius mapping. Causely’s CRE continuously infers the impacted services, endpoints, databases, and SLOs to drive the right prioritization.
  • Automatic remediation. Causely provides context‑rich explanations of actual causes and can automatically remediate by applying the specific fix at runtime, configuration, or code level.
  • Fast, low‑lift enablement. Connect Instana via API and start diagnosing in minutes with no changes to your services.

Setup Guide​

Step 1: Create an API token in Instana​

Create an API token for your Instana account with read access to applications, endpoints, metrics, and infrastructure.

Step 2: Create a Kubernetes Secret​

Create a secret with your Instana account URL and API token:

kubectl create secret generic \
  --namespace causely instana-credentials \
  --from-literal=url="https://your-instana.example.com" \
  --from-literal=api-token="<INSTANA_API_TOKEN>"
# Optional (only if necessary for your environment):
#  --from-literal=insecure-skip-verify="true"

Alternatively, you can create the secret using a YAML manifest:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: instana-credentials
  namespace: causely
type: Opaque
stringData:
  url: 'https://your-instana.example.com'
  api-token: '<INSTANA_API_TOKEN>'
  # insecure-skip-verify: 'true'  # optional

Step 3: Update Causely configuration​

Enable the Instana scraper and reference your secret:

scrapers:
  instana:
    enabled: true
    accounts:
      - secretName: instana-credentials
        # namespace: your-namespace  # optional; defaults to the mediator pod namespace

Alternative: Enable Credentials Autodiscovery​

Causely supports credentials autodiscovery so you can add new accounts without editing config. Label the Kubernetes secret to enable autodiscovery for the Instana scraper:

kubectl --namespace causely label secret instana-credentials "causely.ai/scraper=Instana"

What Data is Collected​

The Instana scraper collects and maps the following into Causely:

  • Service and dependency graph: Instana application services and service-map connections, aligned to Kubernetes workloads and services
  • Endpoints: HTTP paths and RPC methods derived from Instana endpoints
  • Endpoint metrics: Requests, errors, and latency percentiles (p90, p95, p99, max) attached to endpoints
  • Cross-service and cross-endpoint calls: Observed calls with error counts and latency distributions used to ground edges in behavior
  • Pod-to-service and service-to-pod metrics: Access metrics that attribute consumption and exposure per workload
  • Database insights: Queries grouped by statement with call volumes and latency; access attributed to calling services/endpoints and mapped to database/table entities
  • Kubernetes metadata: Namespace and cluster labels added to services for context