System requirements of a single-node deployment
View the system requirements of Self-Hosted Standard Edition on a single-node cluster.
Supported platforms and operating systems
Make sure you have a host on which you can run the Self-Hosted Standard Edition installer.
- The host can be a virtual machine or a dedicated physical machine.
- The host must be new with a freshly installed operating system. If you want to use a host that was previously used for something else, you must reinstall the operating system.
- Self-Hosted Standard Edition must not co-exist with a Self-Hosted Classic Edition (Docker).
Instana supports the following platforms and operating systems for the host:
| Platform | Operating system |
|---|---|
| Linux® x86_64 | Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® (RHEL) 9 and 8 |
| Ubuntu 24.04, 22.04, 20.04, and 18.04 | |
| Debian 12, 11, and 10 | |
| CentOS Stream 9 | |
| Amazon Linux 2023 | |
| Oracle Linux 9 | |
| SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 15 SP5 | |
| Linux® arm64 | Supported on AWS Graviton . Deployment on
other operating systems on arm64 is not tested. |
Hardware requirements
The host must meet the CPU, memory, and storage minimum requirements.
CPU and memory requirements
Instana provides two installation types that you can set during installation. Pick an installation type based on your environment. The default installation type is demo.
- Use
demoinstallation type only for test and demo environments. - Use
productioninstallation type for production environments.
After you install Standard Edition, you cannot convert or migrate from demo installation type to production installation type.
The number of supported managed virtual servers (MVS) or hosts depend on several factors. To support more than 1500 MVS or hosts, you might need to consider Self-Hosted Custom Edition (Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform) as it provides more options to scale and provides more high-availability and redundancy.
Some optional features might need more CPU and memory. Table 1 and Table 2 provide the CPU and memory requirements of the two installation types and the following optional features. If you plan to enable these optional features, it is ideal that you provide the CPU and memory that they need to avoid performance issues.
For more information about all the optional features that you can install, see Enabling optional features.
If you are enabling Self monitoring of your Standard Edition host, you need additional CPU and memory as shown in Table 2.
| Installation type or feature |
Number of CPU cores | Memory (GB) |
|---|---|---|
demo |
16 | 64 |
| Automation framework | 1.2 | 4.8 |
| Analyze logs | 2 | 8 |
| Business monitoring | 1 | 4 |
| End-user monitoring | 1 | 4 |
| Self monitoring | 1 | 2 |
| Synthetic monitoring | 1.5 | 6 |
| Installation type or feature |
Number of CPU cores | Memory (GB) |
|---|---|---|
production |
24 | 96 |
| Automation framework | 1.5 | 6 |
| Analyze logs | 3 | 12 |
| Business monitoring | 1.5 | 6 |
| End-user monitoring | 2 | 4.5 |
| Self monitoring | 1 | 2 |
| Synthetic monitoring | 2 | 8 |
Storage requirements
The total storage requirement depends significantly on the infrastructure and workload that you plan to monitor. Furthermore, optionally used features such as Logging and Synthetics affect the required storage capacity.
The disk storage speed requirements measured as input/output operations per second (IOPS) are shown in the following table:
| Installation type | Required | Preferred |
|---|---|---|
demo |
3000 | 6000 |
production |
6000 | 9000 |
For each installation type, the following table provides the storage volume requirements of the directories used in Instana. For more information about the directories, see Default directories.
| Installation type |
Root directory (GB) |
Data directory (GB) |
Metrics directory (GB) |
Analytics directory (GB) |
Objects directory (GB) |
Cluster data directory (GB) |
$HOME directory (GB) in an online environment |
$HOME directory (GB) in an air-gapped environment |
Total storage volume (TB) in an online environment |
Total storage volume (TB) in an air-gapped environment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
demo |
140 | 150 | 300 | 500 | 250 | 100 | 10 | 40 | 1.45 | 1.48 |
production |
140 | 500 | 1000 | 1200 | 1000 | 100 | 10 | 40 | 3.95 | 3.98 |
In an air-gapped environment, you need 20 GB more disk space in the directory where you create the air-gapped package, both on the bastion host and the Instana host. For more information about the package, see Creating the air-gapped installation package.
For about a month, you must monitor the storage volume that you initially assigned. You can then increase the capacity if necessary. Also, if you use more agents or enable more optional features, you must monitor the memory usage.
Default directories
Instana uses the following directories for data storage.
- Data directory: Used for Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, and Kafka data stores. The default location is
/mnt/instana/stanctl/data. - Metrics directory: Used for Cassandra and BeeInstana data stores. The default location is
/mnt/instana/stanctl/metrics. - Analytics directory: Used for ClickHouse data store. The default location is
/mnt/instana/stanctl/analytics. - Objects directory: Used for raw spans, Synthetic monitoring, and End-user monitoring (EUM). The default location is
/mnt/instana/stanctl/objects. - Cluster data directory: Used for cluster data. The default location is
/var. $HOMEdirectory: Home directory of the current root or non-root user.
Due to the high data throughput of various Instana features and to avoid performance issues, use fast, dedicated storage such as solid-state drives (SSDs). Use separate disks for each of the data, metrics, analytics, and objects directories.
If you are using separate disks, you must mount the following directories onto the disks:
- Cluster data directory: You can specify a custom directory if you don’t have enough disk space under
/var. For example,/xyz/data. Make sure to specify this directory by using the--cluster-data-dirduring installation. $HOMEdirectory:$HOMErefers to the home directory of the current user. For example, if the user is a root user,$HOMEwould be/root; for a non-root user,$HOMEwould be/home/<username>.
Networking requirements
The following ports on your host must be open and accessible. For more information about opening these ports, see Firewall rules.
Make sure that you have a high-speed, low-latency, and stable connection with the designated backend server for all agents to download the packages.
| Port number | Direction | Protocol | Source | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 22 | Inbound | TCP | External | Port required for Secure Shell (SSH) connection (required only if you want to log in SSH) |
| 80 | Inbound | TCP | External | HTTP protocol for Instana console UI |
| 443 | Inbound | TCP | External | HTTPS protocol for Instana console UI, Instana console API, Instana EUM, OpenTelemetry, and Instana agent acceptor port |
| 443 | Outbound | TCP | External | Required only in online environments. For more information, see Outbound network access requirements for self-hosted Instana deployments. |
| 8443 | Inbound | TCP | External | Instana agent acceptor port. This port is optional. |
| all | Inbound | TCP/UDP | 10.42.0.0/16 and 10.43.0.0/16 |
Subnets of the self-hosted Instana components |
| all | Inbound | TCP/UDP | Loopback | Open the ports to allow a VM to send and receive its own data packets. |
See the following notes:
- External source means that the port must be accessible from outside of the Instana self-hosted enterprise (private) network.
- IP addresses
10.42.0.0/16and10.43.0.0/16must be able to access all ports (1 - 65535) internally. - The firewall must trust all traffic from the loopback address.
- Port 443 outbound is needed for accessing certain repositories. For more information, see Outbound network access requirements.
What's next
Proceed with preparing your environment.