Instana today announced support for World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Trace Context and User Timing APIs within its application performance monitoring (APM) suite. The Chicago-based APM vendor specializes in providing customers greater visibility across cloud-native microservices.

W3C's Trace Context and User Timing's offer users a standard means for implementing distributed traces. By adding support for these APIs, Instana claims it can more efficiently correlate traces, identify root cause, and even pass contextual information from transaction to transaction regardless of its origin.

"Standards like Trace Context are increasingly important with the rise of cloud computing and modern platforms, especially as application development moves to a new level of abstraction where standards provide building blocks, enabling compatibility and interoperability of different application components, simplifying the development process, and speeding up time-to-market," explained Sergey Kanzhelev, W3C Distributed Tracing Working Group Editor and co-chair, in a statement.

Instana's APM tools work by automatically discovering application components from sources like Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda, Kubernetes, and Docker. From there it can deploy monitoring sensors to each part of the application stack without requiring user input or restarts.

“Developers and operations staff need maximum observability to work as effectively as possible,” said Chris Farrell, Instana technical director and APM strategist, in a statement. “By combining data from proprietary sources and W3C User Timing and Trace Context, Instana provides the best of both visibility worlds.”

The latest release isn't limited to newly generated W3C User Timing events either. Instana's latest release can collect pre-existing events without the need for custom JavaScript API calls. Once collected, this information is fed into Instana's Unbounded Analytics engine, allowing patterns across multiple profiles to be discovered and analyzed.