Installing host agents
You can install Instana host agents in multiple methods depending on the type of systems that you want to monitor and whether you want dynamic or static host agents. You can set up Instana specifically to monitor cloud services.
For information on cloud service agents, see Instana cloud service agents.
- Checking agent requirements
- Installing on a third-party platform
- Installing on a self-managed platform
- Installing on an operating system
- Checking the status of the host agent
To install a host agent, review host agent requirements. Click the platform on which you want to install the Instana host agent. The instructions to install the host agent on the selected platform are displayed.
After you install a host agent, you can check the status of the host agent.
Checking agent requirements
Before you install a host agent, check requirements such as supported versions and network requirements for host agents.
You can check the requirements for the host agent when you select the type of agent to install. For information on agent requirements, see Instana agent requirements.
For network requirements for host agents, see network requirements.
Network requirements
Some components of the host agent run independent of the host agent process, and they connect to the host agent process by using the local network.
For communication between agents and sensors in containerized setups, configure the network.
The ports that must be opened to reach the agent process are listed in the following table.
Apart from the default port 42699, other ports are required depending on the language that you want to trace.
| Sensor | Port range | Configurable |
|---|---|---|
| Agent API | 42699 | |
| JVM tracing (Java®, Kotlin, Scala, Clojure) and sensors for technologies that run on the JVM[^1] | All ephemeral ports | |
| Crystal sensor | 42699 | Environment variable |
| Envoy, NGINX, and other Proxies tracing | 42699 | Environment variable |
| Go sensor | 42699 | Environment variable |
| .NET Sensor | 42699 | |
| Node.js Sensor | 42699 | Environment Variable |
| PHP Sensor | 16816 | PHP configuration |
| Python Sensor | 42699 | Environment Variable |
| Ruby Sensor | 42699 | Environment Variable |
| OpenTelemetry OTLP/gRPC | 4317 |
In Kubernetes environments, the network policy must allow a connection between agent pods and service pods for communication between external sensors and agent.
[^1] Spring Boot, Dropwizard, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Neo4j, Hazelcast, ActiveMQ, Kafka, Finagle, Tomcat, Jetty, JBoss, WebLogic, WebSphere, Glassfish, Hadoop, HBase, Solr, Spark, Jira, Liferay, Mule, Ping Directory, Jenkins
Installing on a third-party platform
Click the platform on which you want to install the Instana agent. The instructions to install the host agent for the selected platform is displayed.
Installing on a self-managed platform
Installing on an operating system
Checking the status of the host agent
After you install the host agent, you can check the status of the host agent on the Instana UI or on the host.
Checking the status on the Instana UI
To verify that the agent is connected to the Instana backend, check its status on the Instana UI. To check the status of the Instana agent, complete the following steps:
- Log on to the Instana UI.
- In the navigation menu, click More > Agents.
- In "Agent Details," check the status of the host agent.
To find an agent in a long list of host agents, you can use the search bar with a simple string like Windows or the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the host, or more complex strings that use a query syntax. For more information,
click (?) in the search bar or see the topic Filter with Dynamic Focus.
Checking the status on the host
To check the status of the host agent on your host, run the status command. The command is supported on the Windows and Linux operating systems.
Windows
To check the status of the host agent on your Windows host computer, run the following command:
<instana-agent-install-dir>\bin\status.bat
You can also check the status of the host agent as a Windows service by checking your Windows services list for instana-agent-service.
Linux
To check the status of the host agent on Linux, run the following command:
<instana-agent-install-dir>/bin/status