System requirements of a single-node deployment

CPU and memory requirements

Instana provides two installation types that you can set during installation. Pick an installation type based on your environment. The default installation type is demo.

• Use demo installation type only for test and demo environments.
• Use production installation type for production environments.

After you install Standard Edition, you cannot convert or migrate from demo installation type to production installation type.

The number of supported managed virtual servers (MVS) or hosts depend on several factors. To support more than 1500 MVS or hosts, you might need to consider Self-Hosted Custom Edition (Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform) as it provides more options to scale and provides more high-availability and redundancy.

Some optional features might need more CPU and memory. Table 1 and Table 2 provide the CPU and memory requirements of the two installation types and the following optional features. If you plan to enable these optional features, it is ideal that you provide the CPU and memory that they need to avoid performance issues.

For more information about all the optional features that you can install, see Enabling optional features.

If you are enabling Self monitoring of your Standard Edition host, you need additional CPU and memory as shown in Table 2.

Storage requirements

The total storage requirement depends significantly on the infrastructure and workload that you plan to monitor. Furthermore, optionally used features such as Logging and Synthetics affect the required storage capacity.

Instana uses the following four directories for data storage. Due to the high data throughput of various Instana features, separate and fast storage volumes are required for each of the four directories.

• Data directory for Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, and Kafka data stores.
• Metrics directory for Cassandra and BeeInstana data stores.
• Analytics directory for ClickHouse data store.
• Objects directory for raw spans, Synthetic monitoring, and End-user monitoring (EUM).

To avoid performance issues, use fast, dedicated storage such as solid-state drives (SSDs) and use separate disks for each directory.

The disk storage speed requirements measured as input/output operations per second (IOPS) are shown in the following table:

The following table provides the storage volume requirements of each installation type:

If variable data (/var) and home ($HOME) directories are mounted on separate disks, refer to the following table for the minimum required free space for each installation type.

For about a month, you must monitor the storage volume that you initially assigned. You can then increase the capacity if necessary. Also, if you use more agents or enable more optional features, you must monitor the memory usage.