Instana agent requirements

Before you start to install and use the Instana agent, you must make sure to meet the requirements for the agent.

The requirements are different for each type of Instana agent.

To monitor remote services (like IBM Z HMC, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Oracle, Microsoft® Azure) in a Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift cluster, do not install Instana agents on each node of the cluster. Install Instana agents on dedicated host machines.

Serverless agents

Select an agent from the following list to see its requirements:

Web and mobile agents

Select an agent from the following list to see its requirements:

Host agents

The support information and unique requirements for each host agent are available in their corresponding installation topics. To see the requirements, open the installation topic of the agent by clicking the required platform icon in the Installing the agent section.

In addition to these requirements, you also need to configure the network and resources for some host agents to function properly. For more information, see Network requirements, Outbound network access requirements, and Resource requirements.

Network requirements

Some components of the host agent run outside the host agent process, and uses the local network to connect to the host agent. You must open the ports that are listed in the following table to make sure that the agents and sensors communicate properly.

Table 1: Port range information for sensors
Sensor Port range Configurable
Agent API 42699
JVM tracing (Java®, Kotlin, Scala, Clojure) and sensors for the technologies that run on the JVM[^1] 42699
Crystal Sensor 42699 Environment Variable
Envoy, NGINX, and other Proxies tracing 42699 Environment Variable
Go Sensor 42699 Environment Variable
.NET Sensor 42699
Node.js Sensor 42699 Environment Variable
PHP Sensor 16816 PHP configuration
Python Sensor 42699 Environment Variable
Ruby Sensor 42699 Environment Variable
OpenTelemetry OTLP/gRPC 4317/4318

In Kubernetes environments, the network policy must allow a connection between agent pods and service pods so that external sensors can communicate with the agent.

[^1] Spring Boot, Dropwizard, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Neo4j, Hazelcast, ActiveMQ, Kafka, Finagle, Tomcat, Jetty, JBoss, WebLogic, WebSphere, Glassfish, Hadoop, HBase, Solr, Spark, Jira, Liferay, Mule, Ping Directory, Jenkins.

Outbound network access requirements

Before you install and deploy the agent, make sure that the firewall and proxy properly to allow the outbound network access for dynamic agent updates.

  • If you use a dynamic host agent in an Instana SaaS environment, configure the outbound ports as shown in the following table:

    Table 2: Port information for dynamic agent in SaaS
    Port Protocol Authentication Repository or URL
    443 HTTPS Yes https://artifact-public.instana.io

  • If you use a dynamic host agent in an online Instana self-hosted environment, configure the outbound ports as shown in Table 3.

  • If you use a dynamic host agent in an offline (air-gapped) Instana environment, configure the outbound ports of the proxy server as shown in Table 3.

    Table 3: Port information for dynamic agent in self-hosted
    Port Protocol Authentication Repository or URL Required by Comments
    443 TCP Yes https://artifact-public.instana.io - Standard Edition
    - Custom Edition
    - Classic Edition    		 Repository for kubectl plug-in, package files for the Classic Edition, Instana backend images, new sensors, updates to existing sensors, and agent updates for dynamic agents.

Alternatively, for offline (air-gapped) Instana environments, you can configure dynamic agent updates by setting up a mirror of the Instana agent repository. For more information, see Setting up agent repositories for dynamic host agents

Resource requirements

The default resources provided to the Instana agent are adequate for every monitoring scenario. The number of monitored applications rarely affects the resource consumption. You must adjust the Instana agent resources only when the agent's self-monitoring indicates performance issues after you clarify with the Instana support team.

The default memory requirement for the Instana agent is 512 MB, and the CPU consumption is not restricted if you install the agent on a host system. For Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift installations, the CPU requests and limits, along with memory requests and limits are defined as follows:

resources:
  requests:
    memory: "768Mi"
    cpu: 0.5
  limits:
    memory: "768Mi"
    cpu: 1.5

For more information about limiting or extending host agent CPU limits and memory, see Limiting host agent CPU and memory.