Installing the host agent on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

To install the Instana host agent on Amazon EC2, complete specific steps in the Instana UI for your Linux® or Windows® platform.

After you install the host agent, you can check the status of the host agent and monitor your AWS EC2 instances. For more information about monitoring AWS EC2 instances, see Monitoring AWS EC2 and Instana blog post.

Installing a host agent

You can install the host agent for Linux or Windows-based Amazon EC2 instances.

Linux-based Amazon EC2 instance

To install and run the host agent for Linux-based Amazon EC2 instance, complete the following steps:

  1. Sign in to the Instana UI, and on the home page, click Deploy Agent.

    If you start a new trial instance of Instana, the agent catalog is displayed with a prompt to select a host agent to install.

  2. On the "Agent catalog" page, click one of the following tiles:

    • AWS Elastic Computing (EC2) - Linux
    • Linux AWS Elastic Computing (EC2)

  3. Select the packaging option to install a dynamic or static agent and the runtime option that you want to use. If you change options, then the script parameters are updated.

    The script is prefilled with your agent key and host agent endpoint.

    #!/bin/bash

curl -o setup_agent.sh https://setup.instana.io/agent && chmod 700 ./setup_agent.sh && sudo ./setup_agent.sh -a <your-agent-key> -d <your-agent-key> -t dynamic -e <host-agent-endpoint> -s -y

    The script is based on the agent one-liner script for Linux. You can easily modify the script to accommodate more parameters as described in Additional One-Liner parameters.

  4. Copy the script and then use it as user data to install the host agent for your AWS EC2 instance.

    For more information about how to use the installation script with user data in AWS EC2, see the AWS documentation.

Windows-based Amazon EC2 instance

To install and run the host agent for Windows-based Amazon EC2 instance, complete the following steps:

  1. Sign in to the Instana UI, and on the home page, click Deploy Agent.

    If you are starting a new trial instance of Instana, the agent catalog is displayed with a prompt to select a host agent to install.

  2. On the "Agent catalog" page, click one of the following tiles:

    • AWS Elastic Computing (EC2) - Windows 64 bit
    • Windows Elastic Computing (EC2) - Windows 64 bit

  3. Select the packaging option to install a dynamic or static agent. If you change options, then the script parameters are updated.

    The script is prefilled with your agent key and host agent endpoint.

  4. Copy the script and then use it as user data to install the host agent for your AWS EC2 instance.

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 agent deployment

If you cannot install the agent successfully at first, you can check log messages and troubleshooting tips. For more information about troubleshooting host agents, see Troubleshooting.

If this troubleshooting section does not answer the questions that you have, contact the IBM Instana support team.