Case Study: Paxata achieves rapid root-cause detection and full container visibility with IBM Instana

Paxata’s Life Changing Experience Using Instana

Paxata, a provider of enterprise self‑service data preparation used across large enterprises, was running 70–80 hosts and 25 production servers and faced slow, time‑consuming troubleshooting of application‑layer issues. Their previous APM (Sysdig) focused on infrastructure metrics, forcing engineers to dig through Splunk or reproduce problems in test environments—often taking days or more than a week—while Paxata moved toward a Docker/Kubernetes containerized stack. After evaluating competitors, Paxata selected IBM Instana for automatic monitoring and root‑cause analysis.

IBM Instana was deployed quickly (including Instana AutoTrace and the Instana SDK for WebSockets) and delivered continuous, no‑sampling distributed tracing, source‑code visibility, and automatic root‑cause identification. Paxata immediately discovered unknown activity, filed two straightforward bugs, then used the SDK insights to log nine serious bugs (three described as “life‑changing”), identified slow REST calls caused by MongoDB interactions, and set alerts to track frequency—dramatically shortening time to diagnose and enabling engineers to fix underlying causes rather than just restore service.

Paxata

David Levinger

Vice President of Technical Operations and Support