Installing Instana agents

About Instana agent

Instana requires only a single agent per host. The Instana agent runs as a separate process. It discovers technologies that are running in your environment. Based on the discovered technologies, the agent automatically deploys technology-specific sensors, which send appropriate metrics back to the agent. The Instana agent sends these metrics to the Instana backend.

Types of Instana agents

Install an Instana agent for collecting data from systems that you want to monitor in your environment.

To monitor remote services (such as IBM Z HMC, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Oracle, and Microsoft® Azure) in a Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift cluster, install the Instana agent on the cluster rather than on each node.

• Host agents: A host agent runs on your host to collect and aggregate data from various sensors before it sends the data to the Instana backend. You can install the host agent on a virtual machine (VM), a physical host, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, VMware® Tanzu, or other similar platforms.

  After you install the host agent, Instana sensors, which are designed to monitor specific technologies, are automatically installed. Most sensors are automatically installed and configured after the host agent is installed. But for some sensors, you might need to do some configurations to make these sensors work. For the list of supported sensors, see Agent sensors and Action sensors.

• Cloud service agents: These agents monitor services that are managed by cloud providers, like Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) or Azure subscriptions.

• Serverless agents: These agents monitor AWS Lambda and other Serverless platforms.

• Website agent and mobile agents: These agents monitor websites and mobile applications.

Installing Instana agents

For information about installing and configuring Instana agents, select an agent depending on your environment.