Permission to Enable/disable Heap Dumps create Option (JVM Backchannel Options) from Instana UI

Dear IBM Instana Development Team,

I am sharing some insights and suggestions from our Instana software experiences. While we greatly appreciate the software's capabilities, we have identified a potential area for improvement concerning the Heap Dump feature found in the Java JVM view of the Instana UI.

Problem: 

The current implementation of the Heap Dump feature can, under specific conditions, consume an excessive amount of disk space, especially in container-based applications. This scenario may result in the unwanted termination of the container, which poses a significant risk to the stability and security of production processes. Such an event could lead to severe consequences, threatening the operational continuity of businesses.

Suggested Improvement:

Immediate Measure:  
An interim mitigation could be implementing a group permission system on the feature. This way, usage could be restricted or permitted based on user roles, providing a basic level of control and security on the UI level.

Long-term Enhancement: 
We suggest adding the ability to toggle the Heap Dump feature at the agent level for a more comprehensive and long-lasting solution. This would allow teams to activate or deactivate the feature as required using environment variables. Administrators could keep it turned off by default, only enabling it when necessary. This control could potentially be introduced as an additional setting in the agent configuration, which could be overridden with the Instana configuration environment variable from the process.

We believe these enhancements would significantly boost the utility of the Instana software by improving its security and stability in production environments. We hope our suggestions align with your ongoing development efforts and that they offer a fresh perspective for the improvement of Instana.