Installing Instana agents

Instana requires only a single agent for a host. The Instana agent runs as a separate process and discovers technologies that are running in your environment. Based on the discovered technologies, the agent automatically deploys technology-specific sensors, which send appropriate metrics back to the agent. The Instana agent sends these metrics to the Instana backend.

Instana offers four different types of agents depending on the services that you want to monitor.

• Host agents: Install and configure host agents to collect data from a variety of host platforms (for example, Windows, Linux, Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, and Amazon EC2).

• Cloud service agents: Install and configure cloud service agents to collect data from a variety of cloud service platforms (for example, Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft® Azure).

• Serverless agents: Install and configure serverless agents to collect data from a variety of serverless platforms (for example, AWS Fargate, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Run).

• Website agent and mobile agents: Install and configure the Instana website agent and mobile agents to collect data from websites and a variety of mobile platforms (for example, iOS and Android).

For more information about Instana agents, see Instana agent types.