Installing Instana agents

You can install the following Instana agents to monitor your technology stacks as you need.

Note: 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.

• Host agents: A host agent runs on your host to collect and aggregate data from various sensors before it sends the data to the Instana backend. You can install the host agent on a virtual machine (VM), a physical host, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, VMware® Tanzu, or other similar platforms.

  After you install the host agent, Instana sensors, which are designed to monitor specific technologies, are automatically installed. Most sensors are automatically installed and configured after the host agent is installed. But for some sensors, you might need to do some configurations to make these sensors work. For the list of supported sensors, see Agent sensors and Action sensors.

• Cloud service agents: These agents monitor services that are managed by cloud providers, like Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) or Azure subscriptions.

• Serverless agents: These agents monitor AWS Lambda and other Serverless platforms.

• Website agent and mobile agents: These agents monitor websites and mobile applications.