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In this code pattern, we will integrate Instana with a polyglot microservice travel application on OpenShift. Instana is a fully automated Enterprise Observability solution, with infrastructure monitoring and Application Performance Management (APM), designed specifically for the challenges of managing microservice and cloud-native applications.…

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Integrate Instana with a Microservice Application on OpenShift

https://developer.ibm.com/patterns/integrating-instana-with-microservice-app-on-openshift/

In this code pattern, we will integrate Instana with a polyglot microservice travel application on OpenShift. Instana is a fully automated Enterprise Observability solution, with infrastructure monitoring and Application Performance Management (APM), designed specifically for the challenges of managing microservice and cloud-native applications. We will generate traffic to the application using Puppeteer and analyze the traffic on the Instana dashboard. The travel application used in this code pattern is a part of the Bee Travels project that focuses on some of the first version services of the application. The services included in this code pattern are:

  • Destination v1 (Node.js)
  • Car Rental v1 (Node.js)
  • Hotel v1 (Python)
  • Currency Exchange (Node.js)
  • UI (Node.js/React)

Architecture

  1. The Puppeteer script generates traffic to the Bee Travels application running in the OpenShift cluster.
  2. The Instana code in each service of the Bee Travels application sends data about each respective service to the Instana Agent in the OpenShift cluster (one Instana Agent per cluster node).
  3. The Instana Agent sends that data to your account on Instana where you can analyze/monitor the Bee Travels microservices through the Instana dashboard.

Before we begin, you need an IBM Cloud account to follow along. Create one or Login here: IBM Cloud

Steps

  1. Prerequisites
  2. Fork the repo
  3. Integrate Instana
  4. Deploy to OpenShift
  5. Generate Traffic and Analyze with Instana

1. Prerequisites

2. Fork the repo

  1. Scroll to the top of this repo and press the Fork button.

  2. Select the account from the list that you would like to fork the repo to.

3. Integrate Instana

Once you have access to Instana, open up the Instana dashboard. Press Add Website and enter a name for your website ex. Bee Travels

Copy the generated script and insert it into the <head> tag of /src/services/ui/frontend/public/index.html. This integrates Instana into the UI front end of the application. This will now allow you to analzye page loads, traffic, and more to the front end of the application.

Instana is already integrated into the services. To learn how to integrate Instana with your own services, documentation is provided for integrating Instana into Node.js and Python applications, as well as many other technologies. Having Instana in backend services allows for distributed traces, telemetry and other information about calls made to a service to be sent to Instana. In addition, you can analyze individual trace calls to show how your services are communicating with one another. You can view how Instana is integrated in each Bee Travels service here by going to the following:

Destination Service

Car Rental Service

Hotel Service

Currency Exchange Service

Now that Instana has been incorporated into the code, we are now ready to get the credentials for deploying an Instana Agent. To do this, from the Instana dashboard press Deploy Agent

Next, select OpenShift as the platform and Operator as the technology and copy the Instana Service Endpoint, Instana Service port and Instana Application Key. These will be needed later when deploying the Instana Agent into your OpenShift cluster.

4. Deploy to OpenShift

  1. Provision an OpenShift Cluster.

NOTE: This step can take about 30 minutes

  1. Open the OpenShift console and copy/paste your login command (oc login...) to a terminal window.

  1. From the terminal window, run the build-and-deploy.sh script to build the Bee Travels application and deploy it to your OpenShift cluster.

NOTE: This step can take a few minutes

cd instana-openshift
./build-and-deploy.sh -d <DOCKERHUB_USERNAME>

Once the script completes, you can verify the application services are running on your OpenShift cluster by going to Workloads -> Pods in your OpenShift console. Also, verify you are in the newly created bee-travels project. It should look like the following:

  1. Now that the application services are deployed to your OpenShift cluster, it is time to expose the UI using a route. From the OpenShift console, go to Networking -> Routes and press the Create Route button.

Next, fill out the route fields exactly like the following screenshot and then create the route.

Keep note of the newly created route's location/url as this will be needed for later.

  1. The final step with the OpenShift cluster is to install the Instana Agent Operator from OperatorHub. First, you need to create a project for the Instana Agent and configure it's permissions. From your terminal window run the following commands:
oc new-project instana-agent
oc adm policy add-scc-to-user privileged -z instana-agent

Next, go to Operators -> OperatorHub in your OpenShift cluster and search for the Instana Agent Operator. Verfiy that you are in the newly created instana-agent project. Install the operator.

Once the operator is installed, create an instance of an Instana Agent.

Make sure to configure via YAML view and edit the YAML to look like the following screenshot. This is where we will incorporate the Instana credentials that were copied from the previous step. <APP KEY> refers to the Instana Application Key, <ENDPOINT> refers to the Instana Service Endpoint, and <PORT> refers to the Instana Service port. Once the YAML file is properly configured, create the instance of the Instana Agent.

5. Generate Traffic and Analyze with Instana

At this point, you should start to notice your Instana dashboard populating with information from your OpenShift cluster. It is now time to start generating some traffic to the Bee Travels application that is running in your OpenShift cluster. To generate traffic, we will be using a script that uses Puppeteer. From your terminal window, run the following to generate traffic:

cd traffic
npm install
node traffic.js <NUM_CALLS> <ROUTE>

NUM_CALLS - refers to how many calls will be made to the Bee Travels application. Each call will make 2 requests to the application. One will be for searching hotels for a random city and the other will be for searching car rentals for the same random city.

ROUTE - refers to the created route's location/url from OpenShift. Make sure there is no trailing /

Once the traffic script is finished running, go to your Instana dashboard and click on your Bee Travels website to view the traffic. If you are not seeing any traffic, update your viewing time range in the top right corner. Once you are able to view the traffic, you can press Analyze Page Loads to view the individual calls made to the front end UI.

From here, you can scroll down to view all individual calls that were made to the front end UI. Select on one of the calls and click on the path to analyze the individual call.

Once you are viewing the individual call, scroll down and view the XHR activity. You will notice that some of the requests have a View Backend Trace button. Clicking on the button will show a request trace for a backend Bee Travels service that is being called by an API call from the front end UI.

While viewing the trace, you can click on the service from the Service Endpoint List to analyze that backend service on Instana.

This is as far as this code pattern goes with analyzing Bee Travels on Instana but feel free to check out more of what Instana offers in the Instana dashboard.

License

This code pattern is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2. Separate third-party code objects invoked within this code pattern are licensed by their respective providers pursuant to their own separate licenses. Contributions are subject to the Developer Certificate of Origin, Version 1.1 and the Apache License, Version 2.

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In this code pattern, we will integrate Instana with a polyglot microservice travel application on OpenShift. Instana is a fully automated Enterprise Observability solution, with infrastructure monitoring and Application Performance Management (APM), designed specifically for the challenges of managing microservice and cloud-native applications.…

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