Use Agent based App Java Profiling based on Environment Variable value

Introduction

The Instana Agent offers the feature of Profiling Java Applications to find Performance Issues inside the service execution and gives a good output/hin on the code/method level.

This can only be set inside the agent config globally for the agent. Also, this feature is known to have performance costs on the application level and also causes app crashes in some edge cases. This is why we did not use it until now.

Also, Instana has a feature for configuring the Agent called Environment_Variable-based Configuration. With this configuration, the Agent checks the existence/value of the environment variable inside the process before using specific Agent sensor Features. This is widely used for database or queue access on our Openshift Clusters.

Problem:

- We want to use Profiling on our shared Kubernetes / Openshfit Clusters. The profiling feature is only for those teams which feel secure enough to use this feature.

- Other teams, which do not want to use Profiling or do not know about this feature, should not have profiling enabled by default or at least should be able to deactivate it.

This is specially crucial for Production environments.

Anticipated Solution

Add the feature of Environment based sensor configuration to the Java Profiling Sensor inside the instana Agent.

This way we could define inside the app Process, if profiling should be used or not on an per application scope and can also decide about the default behauivour.

see also:

https://www.instana.com/supported-technologies/java-profiling/

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/instana-observability/222?topic=agent-host-configuration#configurations-from-process-environment