System requirements for a single-node deployment

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View the system requirements for Self-Hosted Standard Edition on a single-node cluster.

The specifications in this section represent minimum requirements for a functional deployment.

Each self hosted environment has upper limits for the load it can process. Your actual resource needs may vary based on factors such as:

  • The number of servers under observation.
  • The technologies that run on the observed servers, as some technologies are more metric intensive.
  • The load on an observed environment, from a request perspective, is determined by the trace load, which is directly proportional to both the incoming traffic to the observed system and its internal traffic.
  • Application architecture and traffic patterns, high-traffic microservices generate far more spans than monolithic applications.
  • Infrastructure complexity, a Kubernetes node with hundreds of pods can produce significantly more metrics than a single VM.
  • Enabled features, like End-User Monitoring (EUM), logging, and serverless monitoring can increase data ingestion and storage.
  • Traffic spikes and seasonal events, take into consideration peak periods like Black Friday or promotional campaigns.
Note: Contact your IBM representatives to identify whether your environment fits into the selected deployment approach. For larger workloads, you can increase resources beyond the minimum requirements to ensure optimal performance.

Supported platforms and operating systems

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Make sure you have a host on which you can run the Self-Hosted Standard Edition installer.

Important: The host can be a virtual machine or a dedicated physical machine. The host must be new with a freshly installed operating system. If you want to use a host that was previously used for something else, you must reinstall the operating system. Self-Hosted Standard Edition must not co-exist with a Self-Hosted Classic Edition (Docker).

Instana supports the following platforms and operating systems for the host:

Table 1. Supported platforms
Platform Operating system
Linux® x86_64 Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® (RHEL) 9 and 8
Ubuntu 24.04 and 22.04
Debian 12 and 11
CentOS Stream 9
Amazon Linux 2023
Oracle Linux 9
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 15 SP6 SP7
Linux® arm64

Supported on AWS Graviton

Deployment on other operating systems on arm64 is not tested.

Hardware requirements

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The host must meet the CPU, memory, and storage minimum requirements.

CPU and memory requirements

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

The following tables outline the CPU and memory requirements of a single-node cluster.

Table 2. CPU and memory requirements by installation type
Installation type Number of CPU cores Memory (GB)
demo 16 64
production 24 96

Some optional features might need more CPU and memory. 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 the following table.

Table 3. CPU and memory requirements for optional features
Optional feature Number of CPU cores Memory (GB)
demo production demo production
Action framework 1 1.5 4 7
Analyze logs 1 2 5.5 11
Business monitoring 1 1 3.5 5
end user monitoring 1 2 4 4.5
Self monitoring 1 1 2 2
Synthetic monitoring 1 2 5 8

Storage requirements

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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.

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

Table 4. Disk IOPS requirements of demo installation type
Installation type Required Preferred
demo 3000 6000

Table 5. Disk IOPS requirements of production installation type
Installation type Required Preferred
production 6000 9000

For each installation type, the following table provides the storage volume requirements of the directories used in Instana. For more information about the directories, see Default directories.

Table 6. Storage volume requirements
Installation type Root directory (GB) Data directory (GB) Metrics directory (GB) Analytics directory (GB) Objects directory (GB) Cluster data directory (GB) $HOME directory (GB) in an online environment $HOME directory (GB) in an air-gapped environment Total storage volume (TB) in an online environment Total storage volume (TB) in an air-gapped environment
demo 100 150 300 500 250 100 10 40 1.45 1.48
production 100 500 1000 1200 1000 100 10 40 3.95 3.98
Note: Note: In an air-gapped environment, you need 20 GB more disk space in the directory where you create the air-gapped package, both on the bastion host and the Instana host. For more information about the package, see Creating the air-gapped installation package.

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.

Default directories

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Instana uses the following directories for data storage.

  • Data directory: Used for Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, and Kafka data stores. The default location is /mnt/instana/stanctl/data.
  • Metrics directory: Used for Cassandra and BeeInstana data stores. The default location is /mnt/instana/stanctl/metrics.
  • Analytics directory: Used for ClickHouse data store. The default location is /mnt/instana/stanctl/analytics.
  • Objects directory: Used for raw spans, Synthetic monitoring, and end user monitoring (EUM). The default location is /mnt/instana/stanctl/objects.
  • Cluster data directory: Used for cluster data. The default location is /var.
  • $HOME directory: Home directory of the current root or non-root user.

Due to the high data throughput of various Instana features and to avoid performance issues, use fast, dedicated storage such as solid-state drives (SSDs). Use separate disks for each of the data, metrics, analytics, and objects directories.

If you are using separate disks, you must mount the following directories onto the disks:

  • Cluster data directory: You can specify a custom directory if you don’t have enough disk space in /var. For example, /xyz/data. Make sure to specify this directory by using --cluster-data-dir during installation.
  • $HOME directory: $HOME refers to the home directory of the current user. For example, if the user is a root user, $HOME would be /root; for a non-root user, $HOME would be /home/<username>.

Networking requirements

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The following ports on your host must be open and accessible. For more information about opening these ports, see Firewall rules.

Note: Make sure that you have a high-speed, low-latency, and stable connection on the backend server to pull the necessary packages.
Table 7. Required ports
Port number Direction Protocol Source Description
22 Inbound TCP External Port required for Secure Shell (SSH) connection (required only if you want to log in SSH)
80 Inbound TCP External HTTP protocol for Instana console UI
443 Inbound TCP External HTTPS protocol for Instana console UI, Instana console API, Instana EUM, OpenTelemetry, and Instana agent acceptor port
443 Outbound TCP External Required only in online environments. For more information, see Outbound network access requirements for self-hosted Instana deployments.
8443 Inbound TCP External Instana agent acceptor port. This port is optional.
all Inbound TCP/UDP 10.42.0.0/16 and 10.43.0.0/16 Subnets of the self-hosted Instana components
all Inbound TCP/UDP Loopback Open the ports to allow a VM to send and receive its own data packets.

See the following notes:

  • External source means that the port must be accessible from outside of the Instana self-hosted enterprise (private) network.
  • IP addresses 10.42.0.0/16 and 10.43.0.0/16 must be able to access all ports (1 - 65535) internally.
  • The firewall must trust all traffic from the loopback address.
  • Port 443 outbound is needed for accessing certain repositories. For more information, see Outbound network access requirements.