Expose Real-Time Beacon Ingestion Health Signal to SaaS Tenants

Problem Statement

As an Instana SaaS customer using End User Monitoring (EUM) for website and mobile app monitoring, there is currently no way to proactively verify that beacon data is being successfully ingested and processed by the Instana backend.

The EUM data path traverses several IBM-managed shared components (eum-acceptor → Kafka → eum-processor → eum-health-processor). SaaS customers have zero visibility into the health of this pipeline. If beacon ingestion silently fails — due to a backend issue, a misconfiguration, a network-level disruption, or a regression — the customer has no alert, no indicator, and no API to query.

The only proxy available today is a Website Smart Alert on session throughput drop, which is indirect, noisy in low-traffic windows (e.g., overnight), and does not distinguish between "no real users" and "beacons are failing to be accepted."

The IBM status page has also been observed to lag significantly behind actual service degradation, making it unreliable for proactive awareness.

Proposed Solution

Expose a per-tenant, per-website EUM Ingestion Health signal — surfaced in one or more of the following ways:

A real-time metric on the Website dashboard — e.g., "Beacons accepted (last 5 min)" or "Last beacon received: X minutes ago" — so customers can immediately see whether the pipeline is alive.

A dedicated EUM Ingestion Health Smart Alert blueprint — available under Website Smart Alerts — that fires when no beacons have been received for a configurable time window (e.g., 10 minutes), decoupled from user traffic patterns.

A public health-check endpoint for the EUM acceptor (e.g., GET https://eum-[region]-saas.instana.io/health) that returns a structured response so customers can use Instana Synthetic tests (API Simple) to proactively monitor whether the EUM endpoint is reachable and accepting data.

An Instana API response (e.g., via the existing REST API) that returns the timestamp of the last successfully processed beacon per configured website/app — enabling customers to build their own alerting.

User Story:
As an Instana SaaS customer using EUM, I want to receive an alert when beacon data for my monitored website has not been ingested for more than N minutes, so that I can detect pipeline failures or misconfigurations before they silently corrupt my user experience data and SLO reports.