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Status Future consideration
Workspace Instana
Created by Guest
Created on Aug 30, 2023

Instana vulnerability reporting: Need a standard way of versioning the each technology monitored by Instana

I built a custom toolkit that provides a catalog of vulnerabilities found for the technologies monitored by Instana sensors. The source code is placed on GHE [here](https://github.ibm.com/AIOps-Elite-Team/instana-vulnerability-reporter). However, I found it really difficult to extract information from snapshot details json object as the version collection is not standardaised for each different technology at Instana side.

 The script is querying snapshots of technologies/sensors from Instana API and gets the version information from snapshot details `data.version` to further query the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) through an API. The information of the technology versions across all sensors are not standardised. For-example IBM.Websphere have a version = 8.5.5.13 ,
 the .Net do not even have the data.version but have the version information provided in the data.runtimeVersion field,
 while MS SQL server has the following information returned for data.version = Microsoft SQL Server 2019 (RTM-CU15) (KB5008996) - 15.0.4198.2 (X64) \n\tJan 12 2022 22:30:08 \n\tCopyright (C) 2019 Microsoft Corporation\n\tEnterprise Edition: Core-based Licensing (64-bit) on Windows Server 2019 Standard 10.0 <X64> (Build 17763:.
 This is so challenging to parse each different technology manually. It restricts having a generic logic built to extract the version information for the Instana API.
 Please note that this is a competitive effort to Dynatrace and New Relic.

 I had a chat with the Instana team, it seems like each technology implements this differently. Furthermore, Instana sensors will get the data if the technology can provide it in a standardised way, if not, the data will not be present in Instana snapshots.

Idea priority Medium