Instana, founded in April 2015 with business headquarters in San Mateo, California, and engineering headquarters in Solingen, Germany, raised a $6 million investment led by venture capital firm Target Partners with participation of Codecentric, a leading German IT consulting firm.

Introducing Stan, the virtual DevOps assistant. Stan's job description - know the customer's application.

Instana is tackling the problem of monitoring and managing the increasingly complex big data and microservices architectures; humans can no longer monitor these systems by simply collecting data and building 'dashboards'. Through auto-discovering the application's technologies and topology, Instana is able to deliver unprecedented clarity into the health and performance of these modern architectures. The startup pairs its own ever increasing knowledge base with a machine learning approach to predict future performance degradation or downtime, identify service interdependencies, and offer actionable advice to bring a system back to good health. Stan, Instana's virtual DevOps assistant, offers advice that includes exact root-cause and suggestions for remediation.

'We are thrilled to have Target Partners and Codecentric on board to support us at this exciting point in our journey,' said Mirko Novakovic, co-founder and CEO of Instana.

The company has recently established a footprint in the U.S. and has been named as a Gartner Cool Vendor in the 'Cool Vendors in Availability and Performance, 2016' report by Gartner, Inc., the world's leading IT research and advisory company.

'The Instana team has consistently impressed us with their understanding of the demands of application performance monitoring and their vision for where this industry is headed. The value that their technology creates is unparalleled in the market, and feedback from early customers could not be more positive,' said Berthold von Freyberg, Partner at Target Partners. According to Gartner, Instana is operating in a market worth $2.6 billion growing by 15.8 percent per year.

'Thanks to next generation software architectures, large cloud providers such as Amazon and Google are reinventing the way in which IT services can be delivered. Instana's concept to dynamically discover and model these modern architectures brings a new approach to monitoring such environments,' said Rainer Vehns, co-founder of Codecentric.

Instana is a spin-off from Codecentric and was founded by Mirko Novakovic (CEO), Pete Abrams (COO), Fabian Lange (VP of Engineering), and Pavlo Baron (CTO) in April 2015. The development team has more than 100 years of professional experience in application performance, big data and machine learning. The team has a total number of 23 employees.

About Instana
Instana goes beyond application monitoring and analytics by applying a knowledge base and machine learning approach to assist the IT team. Instana visualizes the application landscape and makes actionable suggestions that assure the operational health of systems and applications. In modern cloud-native and microservice based applications, it is not about monitoring data - it is about deriving actionable information that increases the availability and performance of business applications.

More at: www.instana.com.

About Target Partners
With 300 million under management, Target Partners is one of the leading early-stage venture capital firms in Germany. Target Partners invests in new start-up and early-stage companies and supports them with venture capital during their build-out and expansion phases. With many years of experience as managers, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, the team at Target Partners supports entrepreneurs in developing and marketing products and services, building organizations, raising money and taking companies public in Europe and the United States.

For more details: www.targetpartners.de, follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/targetpartners or Facebook: facebook.com/targetpartners.

About Codecentric
As an expert in custom software development, Codecentric AG is the leader for agile software development and innovative technologies in Germany. Codecentric develops software solutions for the future with 300+ employees at 14 locations in Germany and other European countries.
More at: www.codecentric.de.