Instana Dynamic APM gave us insight when there wasn't a lot of stuff on the market.

The main thing it solved for us, once it was properly configured, was that it was able to not only do the basic monitoring that traditional tools do, like Zabbix, but it was also able to integrate that information along with the APM data that it collects. If a key monitored value crossed a threshold, it would send out an alert. And the solution is able to intelligently find out if something is beyond the range that it normally resides in.

For example, if the load average for a server is normally around three to four, and then suddenly it's around seven, that's obviously something that we need to be alerted about. It provides this kind of more intelligent alerting.

It also has auto-discovery. We didn't need to consider much. We just installed the agent on the host and it was able to detect everything from the host level up to the service level, for whatever stack was installed, and that includes containers and dockers, etc. So a number of used cases were fulfilled with this tool for us.

In addition, as a sysadmin, when an alert comes in that says the site is down or some error has been thrown, normally the first response is to check the logs on the application servers. We find some clue and then we hunt somewhere else. This solution provides the big picture, a look at the whole cluster. So for some obvious things we can just say, "Okay, this not the issue." We don't need to check multiple screens. 

Finally, sometimes it's able to provide a proper RCA on its own. It's able to correlate different events that occurred and that became like an RCA in itself, that we were able to provide to the developer or the customer in question. It helped us, as a DevOps consulting team, to quickly pin down issues that happened in production.