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Status Not under consideration
Workspace Instana
Categories Infrastructure
Created by Guest
Created on Sep 18, 2024

RELATED IDEAS

Have a method to script for a custom metric

Summary:

Provide a custom metric method for the IBM Instana agent which a script (perl/java/sh/etc) could be hosted within the IBM Instana agent and would run at set intervals. The output would then be published to the backend on the node/server.


Description:

The useful nature of this is each operating system, in this case IBM RHEL has commands, in this case free, which would provide a better view on the use and utilization of memory, which since Instana uses the Sigar (system information gatherer and reporter) would not have a library function to provide insight into a vendor specific metric such as IBM RHEL Free.

Reference:

https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_linux/6/html/deployment_guide/s1-sysinfo-memory-usage


If the instana agent had a communication channel that the agent could run a Perl/Java/sh/batch command, with a json or defined structure output, then publish the metric to the backend within the scope of a specific OS metric grouping on a specific node, then be able to add custom events or smart alerts against the custom published metric, would add a level of metric insight that could be customized by the customer.


In the other major APM systems, Wily/CA/Broadcom APM and AppDynamics they offer such knowing that Instana users have a wide range of OS vendors, version due to those selections being suited for their business or purse.

Locking into only using the open source SIGAR library precludes expansion and also future proofing of the Instana system/offering.

With a number of the larger open source offerings, they are moving toward a SSPL license which has restrictions on the hosting of the solution as a SaaS offering, and given the direction of most major providers, are pushing more and more to SaaS solutions.

To contribute and support the Sigar community, develop a module for RHEL to use Free in order to get real time metrics of the use of memory instead of the boundaries of the memory.



Idea priority High
  • Admin
    Henning Treu
    Reply
    |     Oct 15, 2024

    Thanks Billy for your input and the time to describe the idea.

    For the time being we don't consider a special script based input with Instana Agent. For custom metrics, Instana Agent already serves as a prometheus endpoint and as an OpenTelemetry endpoint.

    In addition to what Tom suggested above, here is a blog post from the OpenTelemetry project to vreate custom metrics out of shell scripts: https://opentelemetry.io/blog/2023/any-metric-receiver/

    This can be easily sent into Instana Agent's OTel endpoint for metrics and will be mapped to the host automatically. This keeps communication to a local socket and the Agent still serves as the proxy to Instana's backend.

    I hope this helps.


    Best regards

    Henning Treu - Instana Product Manager - Agent

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Sep 19, 2024

    Thank you for the suggest to use the agent API to push metrics in, and yes, if we either had or defined a custom shell script that would stay in a while loop, with a timer, to publish the metrics every second/minute/hour then yes, we could basically run the free command, parse the output, format to the api metric publish method, then repeat.

    The idea is that the agent, since it already has a timer, process and communication context, it must since it is running the process to use sigar, is to open that interface so that we can inject a custom shell/batch file. This has several relative reason, getting the free metrics in the same time slices as the CPU or other OS level methods, when the agent starts/stops/installed/uninstall the logic goes with it and won't run with the agent present. Lastly communication management, on reading it appears that the suggestion is to open the connection and leave it open and also do the recovery on the connection. If the logic/process was the agent itself, that would already be present and durable.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Sep 18, 2024

    Would this work to achieve the goals

    https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/instana-observability/current?topic=apis-host-agent-rest-api

    1 reply

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