Installing Instana agents

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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 to monitor various services and environments.

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

  • Serverless agents: Install and configure serverless agents to collect data from various 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 various mobile platforms (for example, iOS and Android).

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