Administering the Instana agent on Red Hat OpenShift

Checking the pod status

After you install the agent, you can check the status of the pods in your agent deployment by using the following commands:

kubectl get pods -n instana-agent
kubectl get agent instana-agent -n instana-agent -o yaml | yq ".status"

In a good deployment, the STATUS of all the pods in the namespace must be Running. The instana-agent custom resource should also display status: Running, as show in the following example:

$ kubectl get pods -n instana-agent
NAME                                      READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
controller-manager-6478cb4c6f-8s29b       1/1     Running   0          70m
instana-agent-8ftnj                       1/1     Running   0          70m
instana-agent-9w4vc                       1/1     Running   0          70m
instana-agent-k8sensor-5bbf568976-5pjk2   1/1     Running   0          3h2m
instana-agent-k8sensor-5bbf568976-h96hr   1/1     Running   0          3h2m
instana-agent-k8sensor-5bbf568976-lnbsg   1/1     Running   0          3h2m
instana-agent-zpmrj                       1/1     Running   0          70m

$ kubectl get agent instana-agent -n instana-agent -o yaml | yq ".status"
conditions:
  - lastTransitionTime: "2024-08-06T08:12:03Z"
    message: most recent reconcile of agent CR completed without issue
    observedGeneration: 2

    ...

observedGeneration: 2
oldVersionsUpdated: true
operatorVersion: 0.0.1-dev
status: Running

Configuring the agent

You can configure the Instana agent for Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift in two different ways, depending on the method that you used to install the agent.

Customizing the Container Registry

Depending on your Red Hat OpenShift environment, you might need to customize the Red Hat OpenShift Container Registry.

Name: instana-agent
Image: icr.io/instana/agent:latest

Name: k8sensor
Image: icr.io/instana/k8sensor:latest

Updating the agent installation

Depending on your method of installation, you can update the Instana agent for Red Hat OpenShift in multiple ways.

helm pull --repo https://agents.instana.io/helm --untar instana-agent; kubectl apply -f instana-agent/crds; oc adm policy add-scc-to-user privileged -z instana-agent -n instana-agent; helm upgrade --namespace instana-agent instana-agent \
--repo https://agents.instana.io/helm instana-agent \
--reuse-values

kubectl rollout restart ds instana-agent -n instana-agent

kubectl rollout restart deployment k8sensor -n instana-agent

Managing agents by using the Agent Management dashboard

You can complete the following operations by using the Agent Management dashboard in the Instana UI:

• Changing agent modes
• Changing log level
• Updating agents
• Resetting agents
• Rebooting agents
• Viewing sensors
• Configuration management
  • Initializing configuration management
  • Updating configuration management
• Self-monitoring

To open the Agent Management dashboard, follow the steps:

1. In the sidebar of the Instana UI, select Infrastructure.
2. Click a specific monitored host.
3. On the host dashboard, click Open Agent Management.

Configuring network access for monitored applications

You must configure the network access of the following types of applications for them to communicate with the agent:

• Node.js
• Go
• Ruby
• Python
• .NET Core

These applications need to know the IP that the agent listens. The agent listens on the host IP automatically. You can use the following Downward API snippet to pass the host IP in an environment variable to the application pod:

spec:
  containers:
    env:
      - name: INSTANA_AGENT_HOST
        valueFrom:
          fieldRef:
            fieldPath: status.hostIP

Monitoring master nodes

By default, the agent does not get scheduled on Kubernetes master nodes, because the deployment respects the default taint node-role.kubernetes.io/master:NoSchedule that is set on most master nodes. To monitor master nodes, add the following toleration to the agent DaemonSet:

kind: DaemonSet
metadata:
  name: instana-agent
  namespace: instana-agent
spec:
  template:
  ...
    spec:
      tolerations:
        - key: "node-role.kubernetes.io/master"
          effect: "NoSchedule"
          operator: "Exists"
    ...

For more direct control, install the agent separately on the master nodes. Contact IBM Support for more support for your environment.

Monitoring Kubernetes NGINX Ingress

For guidelines on how to configure the Kubernetes NGINX Ingress and our Agent for capturing NGINX metrics, see the Monitoring NGINX page. Tracing of the Kubernetes NGINX Ingress is also possible via the OpenTracing project, see Distributed Tracing for NGINX Ingress on guidelines how to set that up.

Reporting to multiple backends

To add additional backends by using helm and operator, run the following command. You can use additional backends to configure your Instana agent or leave it empty.

When you run the following command, the agent data is forwarded to multiple backends, along with Kubernetes data and metrics data.

• Using helm:

     helm install instana-agent \
     --repo https://agents.instana.io/helm \
     --namespace instana-agent \
     --create-namespace \
     --set agent.key=my-key \
     --set agent.endpointHost='<your_host_agent_endpoint>' \
     --set agent.endpointPort=443 \
     --set cluster.name='<your_cluster_name>' \
     --set zone.name='zone-name' \
     --set "agent.additionalBackends[0].endpointHost=<your_host_agent_endpoint>" \
     --set "agent.additionalBackends[0].key=<your_agent_key>" \
     --set "agent.additionalBackends[0].endpointPort=443" \
     --set "agent.additionalBackends[1].endpointHost=<your_other_host_agent_endpoint>" \
     --set "agent.additionalBackends[1].key=<your_other_agent_key>" \
     --set "agent.additionalBackends[1].endpointPort=443" \
     instana-agent
  

• Using operator:

  apiVersion: instana.io/v1
  kind: InstanaAgent
  metadata:
    name: instana-agent
    namespace: instana-agent
  spec:
    zone:
      name: edited-zone # (optional) name of the zone of the host
    cluster:
      name: my-cluster
    agent:
      endpointHost: <your_host_agent_endpoint>
      endpointPort: "443"
      env: {}
      key: <your_agent_key>
      additionalBackends:
      - endpointHost: <your_host_agent_endpoint>
        endpointPort: "443"
        key: <your_agent_key>
      configuration_yaml: |
        # You can leave this empty, or use this to configure your instana agent.
        # See https://github.com/instana/instana-agent-operator/blob/main/config/samples/instana_v1_extended_instanaagent.yaml for the extended version.
  
  

To enable reporting to multiple backends from a Kubernetes agent, see the Docker agent configuration.

Configuring Secrets

You can use Secrets to store and manage sensitive data such as credentials, tokens, or keys. See Kubernetes secrets for more details.