Environment Variables

For various environment variables that are used in optionally configuring the major Instana components, see the following information.

Host Agent

Environment Variable Value Description
INSTANA_AGENT_ENDPOINT String The Instana backend endpoint that your host agents connect to. It depends on your region and starts with ingress-.
INSTANA_AGENT_ENDPOINT_PORT String The backend port that your host agents connect to. The default is 443.
INSTANA_AGENT_KEY String Your Instana Agent key.
INSTANA_ZONE String The zone to place this host agent into.
INSTANA_TAGS String, comma-separated A list of tags, which are comma-separated, and associated with the host that runs the agent, such as my_tag=myvalue,my_other_tag.
JAVA_OPTS String, space separated JVM arguments Additional Java® virtual machine configurations that you might want to pass to the startup of the host agent. For example, you might use -Xms<value> and -Xmx<value> to set the minimum and maximum amount of heap available to the agent, respectively.
INSTANA_GIT_REMOTE_REPOSITORY String The URL of the remote Git repository; for example, https://github.com/<your_account>/<your_repo>.git.
INSTANA_GIT_REMOTE_BRANCH String The name of the remote branch that the Instana host agent is to follow; for example, main
INSTANA_GIT_REMOTE_USERNAME String Optional: The username or access token to be used in basic authentication
INSTANA_GIT_REMOTE_PASSWORD String Optional: The password to be used in basic authentication
ENABLE_AGENT_SOCKET true or false The variable to determine the Instana agent's communication direction with JVMs. To allow communication to be directed to the agent, set this variable to true. To direct communication to the JVM, set this variable to false. The default value is true.

For detailed information, see the agent configuration docs and agent git-based configuration docs.

Serverless Monitoring

Environment Variable Value Description
INSTANA_ENDPOINT_URL String The Instana backend endpoint that your serverless agents connect to. It depends on your region and is different from the host agent backend endpoint. It starts with https://serverless-.
INSTANA_AGENT_KEY String Your Instana Agent key. The same agent key can be used for host agents and serverless monitoring.
INSTANA_TIMEOUT Integer Timeout in milliseconds for the HTTP requests reporting data to the Instana backend.
INSTANA_ENDPOINT_PROXY URL Set this variable to http://my-proxy.tld or http://user:password@my-proxy.tld to route the reporting of data to the Instana backend over an HTTP(S) proxy.
INSTANA_EXTRA_HTTP_HEADERS String, semicolon-separated Semicolon-separated list of HTTP headers to be captured.
INSTANA_SERVICE_NAME String Custom service name.
INSTANA_LOG_LEVEL debug, info, warn, or error The log level for the Instana package. By default it's info.
INSTANA_LOG_SPANS true or false Set this variable to true to have the spans that are generated by the Instana instrumentation, which is dumped to standard out. This setting is useful to debug SDK and automatic instrumentation issues.
INSTANA_DEBUG String Set this variable to any value to set the log level to debug.
INSTANA_DISABLE_CA_CHECK true or false Set this variable to true to disable verifying the server certificate against the list of CAs baked into the Lambda runtime when it connects to the Instana backend. Enabling this feature makes your lambda vulnerable to MITM attacks for this connection. This setting should never be used, unless you use Instana On-Premises and are unable to operate the Instana backend with a certificate with a known root CA.
INSTANA_SECRETS String The value must be structured as follows, <matcher>:<secret>[,<secret>], for example: contains-ignore-case:key,password,secret. See the Secrets documentation for details of the matchers.
INSTANA_TAGS String, comma-separated A list of tags, which are comma-separated, and associated with the monitored component, for example my_tag=myvalue,my_other_tag.
INSTANA_ZONE String The zone to place this monitored component into.
INSTANA_DISABLE_USE_OPENTELEMETRY true or false Set this variable to true to disable opentelemetry integration. The default value is false.
INSTANA_STACK_TRACE_LENGTH Integer Set this variable to limit the number of captured stack trace frames in a span.

AWS Lambda Support

Environment Variable Go Java Node.js Python
INSTANA_ENDPOINT_URL ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_AGENT_KEY ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_TIMEOUT ✅ ❌ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_ENDPOINT_PROXY ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_EXTRA_HTTP_HEADERS ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_SERVICE_NAME ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_LOG_LEVEL ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_LOG_SPANS ❌ ✅ ❌ ❌
INSTANA_DEBUG ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_DISABLE_CA_CHECK ❌ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_SECRETS ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_TAGS ❌ ✅ ❌ ❌
INSTANA_ZONE ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_SSM_PARAM_NAME ❌ ❌ ✅ ❌
INSTANA_SSM_DECRYPTION ❌ ❌ ✅ ❌
INSTANA_DISABLE_USE_OPENTELEMETRY ❌ ❌ ✅ ❌

AWS Fargate Support

Environment Variable .NET Core Go Java Node.js Python
INSTANA_ENDPOINT_URL ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_AGENT_KEY ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_TIMEOUT ✅ ✅ ❌ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_ENDPOINT_PROXY ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_EXTRA_HTTP_HEADERS ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_SERVICE_NAME ❌ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_LOG_LEVEL ❌ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_LOG_SPANS ❌ ❌ ✅ ❌ ❌
INSTANA_DEBUG ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_DISABLE_CA_CHECK ❌ ❌ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_SECRETS ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_TAGS ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_ZONE ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_DISABLE_USE_OPENTELEMETRY ❌ ❌ ❌ ✅ ❌

Google Cloud Run Support

Environment Variable Go Node.js
INSTANA_ENDPOINT_URL ✅ ✅
INSTANA_AGENT_KEY ✅ ✅
INSTANA_TIMEOUT ✅ ✅
INSTANA_ENDPOINT_PROXY ✅ ✅
INSTANA_EXTRA_HTTP_HEADERS ✅ ✅
INSTANA_SERVICE_NAME ✅ ✅
INSTANA_LOG_LEVEL ✅ ✅
INSTANA_LOG_SPANS ❌ ❌
INSTANA_DEBUG ✅ ✅
INSTANA_DISABLE_CA_CHECK ❌ ✅
INSTANA_SECRETS ✅ ✅
INSTANA_TAGS ✅ ✅
INSTANA_ZONE ✅ ✅
INSTANA_DISABLE_USE_OPENTELEMETRY ❌ ✅

Dynamic Language Sensors

The Dynamic Language Sensors offered by Instana respect a common set of environment variables. The following table describes this common set.

For more information on Java, Scala, .NET, .NET Core, or PHP, see the corresponding documentation pages.

Environment Variable Value Description
INSTANA_AGENT_HOST IP address or DNS name Allows users to manually specify location of the Instana host agent.
INSTANA_AGENT_PORT Port number Manually specify the port of the Instana host agent.
INSTANA_DISABLE_AUTO_INSTR true or false Disable automatic instrumentation.
INSTANA_SERVICE_NAME String Set the application-wide service name.
INSTANA_PROCESS_NAME String Set a custom label for the infrastructure entity that represents that runtime.[1]
INSTANA_DEBUG Any value Used to enable debug logging. It should be used for only a limited time to avoid overhead and log spamming.
INSTANA_DISABLE_USE_OPENTELEMETRY true or false Set this variable to true to disable opentelemetry integration. The default value is false.
INSTANA_STACK_TRACE_LENGTH Integer Set this variable to limit the number of captured stack trace frames in a span.

For information on Java, Scala, .NET, .NET Core, or PHP, see the corresponding documentation pages.

Language Crystal Go Haskell NGINX Node.js PHP Python Ruby .NET Core .NET
INSTANA_AGENT_HOST ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ❌ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_AGENT_PORT ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ❌ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_DISABLE_AUTO_INSTR N/A N/A N/A N/A ✅ ❌ ✅ ✅ ❌ ❌
INSTANA_SERVICE_NAME ❌ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ❌ ❌
INSTANA_PROCESS_NAME ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_DEBUG ✅ ✅ ❌ ✅ ✅ ❌ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
INSTANA_DISABLE_USE_OPENTELEMETRY ❌ ❌ ❌ ❌ ✅ ❌ ❌ ❌ ❌
INSTANA_STACK_TRACE_LENGTH ❌ ❌ ❌ ❌ ✅ ✅ ❌ ❌ ❌

See the corresponding language page for more details on configuration options:

  1. If the default entity name is used in any alerting rule (for example System Rules > Hosts without matching entities that run on them), changing the entity name by using this capability can trigger those alerts. ↩︎