The concept of observability and how to extend it through cloud native applications has become more and more important for developers, especially when using products and services from Docker Inc. — a technology company that builds developer productivity tools and open-source projects that automates the deployment of code inside software containers.

So why is observability at the center of so many ongoing developer conversations?

“Today, it’s more important than ever to understand what’s going on, because there’s so much more going on,” said Fabian Lange (pictured), founder and vice president of engineering at Instana, an IBM company. “[Observability] is really understanding all those parts of your architecture, of your stack, of the application and … the end user experience. You want to know if a user is experiencing a slow service and what’s the reason for that.”

Lange spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during DockerCon. They discussed observability and how Instana helps customers achieve this. (* Disclosure below.)

Instana’s APM solution explained

Instana is the first and only fully automated Application Performance Management (APM) solution designed specifically for the challenges of managing microservices and cloud native applications, according to Lange. When a company starts to get into cloud native applications, Docker containers provide the way for orchestration, but Instana’s role is to help customers get the observability that is required to provide a good experience to end customers without requiring a company to do all the instrumentation work or the caption configuration work. This is because Instana is automatic.

“It automatically sees all the workloads that are running in your Kubernetes … that are running in Docker containers, but it also connects to legacy databases,” Lange said. “So no configuration required also means that with the high rate of change that some of those applications have … that we will see all those change happening in real time. We provide a lot of this insight that you can get, and that enables you to provide better service for your users.”

Instana not only monitors Docker and everything connected to applications, but it is running on a Docker or platform as a service or software as a service (Saas), according to Lange. Companies don’t need to operate on Instana, as Instana is running on a managed Kubernetes cluster and IBM Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform.

“[We are] skipping out a lot of the manual configuration work that’s boring and not really appealing to developers. Everything is prepackaged and configured automatically,” Lange said. “And the Instana monitoring … is also automatic, so you don’t need to configure your application on how to monitor it. So developers can just focus on delivering features, and whenever there is something, we’ll tell them. I think they enjoy that.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of DockerCon. (* Disclosure: Instana, an IBM company, sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Instana nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE