Instana put a new coat of polish on its application performance monitoring platform today, introducing a new user experience alongside several operational enhancements and monitoring technologies. These improvements are designed to make managing and monitoring cloud-native applications easier and more intuitive.

"As the line blurs between enterprise and cloud-native microservice applications, dev and ops teams need a wider range of technology support and enterprise-level features," said Chris Farrell, technical director and application performance monitoring strategist at Instana, in a statement.

In addition to a revamped user experience, the release adds support for Nginx web-server tracing, Redis Enterprise and IBM MQ monitoring sensors, custom dashboards, and role-based access control.

The vendor implemented custom dashboards to enable customers to tailor their monitoring tools to make relevant information more accessible without the need for a comprehensive understanding of Instana's data and user interfaces. Meanwhile, role-based access controls combat the growing mountain of data created by today's infrastructure. According to Instana, role-based access controls will allow users to create and manage groups with corresponding permissions, thereby reducing the number of visible application perspectives to just those that are relevant.

Alongside these improvements, Instana now supports monitoring on legacy messaging systems using IBM MQ, as well as Redis Enterprise key performance indicators used for real-time health monitoring of instances and clusters.

Finally, Instana says Nginx webserver tracing will help to eliminate blind spots introduced by Nginx proxies.

According to Farrell, these features will provide customers with greater visibility of their applications while making monitoring capabilities easier to deploy.

Instana has made steady strides toward expanding the capabilities of its monitoring platform to new services.

Last month, the company announced support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) Fargate, and earlier this year Instana added support for native monitoring, tracing, and profiling of AWS Lambda serverless functions.

Instana has also had a healthy appetite for smaller monitoring vendors. Shortly before Christmas, Instana expanded its monitoring capabilities, gobbling up BeeInstant, StackImpact, and Signify in a three-course meal of an acquisition.