Installing the host agent on Unix

Supported operating systems

Prerequisites

A Java Development Kit (JDK) needs to be available for the agent. You can see the list of supported JDKs as follows. There are two options:

1. The easiest is to place or link that JDK into <instana-agent-dir>/jvm (so that <instana-agent-dir>/jvm/bin/java exists).

2. The customizable way is to export an environment variable called JAVA_HOME to point to that JDK (this environment variable can be also set via <instana-agent-dir>/bin/setenv).

At the moment, the following JVMs are supported for running the agent:

• IBM OpenJ9 JDK 11 (Preferred)
• Azul Zulu JDK 8 (Preferred on Solaris SPARC)
• Oracle Hotspot JDK 8
• IBM J9 8
• OpenJDK 8
• AdoptOpenJDK 8
• Amazon Corretto JDK 8

It is important that the JVM is executable for any user on the system. You are recommended to use the latest available patch release of the Java distribution of your choice. The agent requires a JDK thats supports TLSv1.3 (available in all current JDK 8 and JDK 11 builds). Note that depending on your OS distribution, the packages provided by the OS distributor might not contain strong encryption support due to export control. If you use such a package, you might meet errors like java.lang.RuntimeException: Could not generate DH key pair.

Download the host agent

1. Sign in to Instana, click More -> Agents -> Instana agent installation -> Unix.

2. Select the archive matching your system architecture and then click Download:

   • AIX (32bit - PowerPC)
   • AIX (64bit - PowerPC)
   • Solaris (32bit - SPARC)
   • Solaris (64bit - SPARC)

   Your agent key and location are pre-populated, so you just have to extract and start the agent.

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. For more information, see Checking the status of the host agent.

Troubleshooting

We have seen several cases, especially Solaris, of customer using pre-POSIX tar utilities that are not capable of handling filenames longer than 100 characters. We advise the use of GNU tar for uncompressing the host agent tarball.