Installing host agents
Depending on what type of systems that you want to monitor and whether you want dynamic or static host agents, multiple options are available to you. For some platforms such as Kubernetes, you have more than one way to install the Instana host agents. For some managed services that are provided by AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and others, you are provided with specialized and streamlined setups.
Note: Before you install the host agent, check the Instana agent requirements first.
- Installing on a third-party platform
- Installing on a self-managed platform
- Installing on an operating system
- Network requirements
- Checking the status of the host agent
Installing on a third-party platform
Installing on a self-managed platform
Installing on an operating system
Network requirements
Some components of the host agent run outside of the host agent process, and connect to the host agent processby using the local network.
To ensure correct communication between agents and sensors, some configurations are needed in containerized setups.
The following table lists the ports that need to be opened to reach the agent process.
Apart from the default port 42699, other ports are required based on the languages that you want to trace.
| Sensor | Port range | Configurable |
|---|---|---|
| Agent API | 42699 | |
| JVM tracing (Java®, Kotlin, Scala, Clojure) and sensors for technologies that run on the JVM[^1] | All ephemeral ports | |
| 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 |
In Kubernetes environments, the network policy must allow a connection between agent pods and service pods, so that external sensors can reach the agent, and vice versa.
[^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
Checking the status of the host agent
After you install the host agent, you can check the status of the host agent in the Instana UI or on the host.
Checking the status in the Instana UI
To verify that the agent is connected to the Instana backend, check its status on the Agents dashboard in the Instana UI. To check the status, complete the following steps:
- In the sidebar of the Instana UI, click More > Agents.
- Search the host agent.
Tip: To find an agent in a long list of host agents, you can use the search bar with the string Windows or other search strings like the Windows hostname.
Checking the status on the host
Windows
To check the status of the host agent on your Windows host computer, run the following command:
<instana-agent-install-dir>\bin\status.bat
You can also check the status of the host agent as a Windows service by checking your Windows services list for instana-agent-service.
Linux
To check the status of the host agent on Linux, run the following command:
<instana-agent-install-dir>/bin/status