A Deep Dive into Application Performance and Efficiency with Instana and Turbonomic

Costs are an essential piece of all company strategies and can define the success of a project or also for an entire company. High performance is important, but at what cost?

The most critical objective of deploying Observability solutions is to improve the applications’ reliability, performance, and availability, but how can we guarantee we are utilizing the infrastructure effectively to deliver good performance?

We can find the root cause of the problems using Observability, but how can we identify which infrastructure component we need to expand to improve the application performance? And how can we automate the infrastructure changes to do it?

This example provides an idea of how to pursue performance with efficiency simultaneously, contributing to the teams and companies on how to deliver solutions covering performance and using the IT infrastructure efficiently.

To exemplify it, we need an application performance management tool (APM) and an Application Resource Management tool (ARM). I will demonstrate two IBM solutions: IBM Instana as the APM solution and IBM Turbonomic as the ARM solution.

The APM solution will identify the bottlenecks, and performance issues, define the SLO, and so on. And the ARM will determine the infrastructure utilization, comparison of Cloud vendor prices, and so on.

The image below shows the application performance using the APM tool; as you can see, the application is running well, and the latency, error rate, and traffic are pretty good.

But let’s go deeper to see if the SLO is being satisfied (that is why it is crucial to set the SLOs).

As you can see, the SLOs are also good, but it is essential to emphasize that we had a peak at the graphs, and we can identify the problem.

Navigating into tracing details using the APM tool, we can identify exactly when it happened:

And going deeper into the specific transaction we can see where is the problem:

Using the APM tool, we identified the performance problem: a query running on a specific host. Is it a resource problem (saturation)? Not sure yet.

Let’s go to the other part of this demonstration, analyzing how the ARM tool will help us.

The ARM solution here will help us to identify two things, the efficiency of the IT resources used by the application and the possibility of sizing up the IT resources to improve the application’s performance.

First, it is good to show how Turbonomic abstracts the Instana data; in other words, how Turbonomic associates the Instana entities with the ARM solution.

As you can see in the image, Application Perspectives (Instana entity) are associated with Business Applications, Endpoints (Instana entity) are associated with Business Transactions, Services (Instana Entity) are associated with services, and processes (Instana entity) are associated as application component:

Let’s see the same application now on the ARM tool. As you can see in the image below, at the left, we have the topology created by the tool since the data centers and infrastructure components through the Business Application, showing in yellow, green, and red the status of the components in terms of efficiency and performance. On the right, we can see, for example, some pending actions:

Clicking on the pending actions, we will see the complete list of possible improvements on the infrastructure (29 actions), where those actions will help to save 129Gb of vmem and 20 vCPUs just for this application (imagine the entire company), accepting the actions it can be automatically changed. We will have an application with the same performance but fewer IT resources.

The ARM tool also recommended some actions related to the performance improvements, as seen in the image below. In addition, the ARM tool can get the SLO from the APM solution to compare and check when the SLO is violated.

This article can help you to define Observability strategies, not only concerning performance but also efficiency, allowing you to deliver high-performance and efficient solutions.

Tiago Dias Generoso is a Distinguished IT Architect | Senior SRE | Master Inventor based in Pocos de Caldas, Brazil. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent the employer’s positions, strategies or opinions.