Instana agent requirements

To learn about the requirements of an Instana agent, click the icon in the following lists to go to each agent topic.

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.

Serverless agents

Web and Mobile agents

Host agent

Click the platform where you want to the install the Instana agent, and see the Supported operating systems, Supported versions, or the Prerequisites section.

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 process by 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