Instana integrate or monitor the network to see a single infrastructure map

I'm going to structure it in three parts:
What platforms like Dynatrace or Splunk do
What the customer expects from Instana
How it can be technically resolved with Instana
1️⃣ Unified console – What do Dynatrace and Splunk do?

🔹 Dynatrace
4
Applications (APM)
Infrastructure (VMs, containers, Kubernetes)
Network (NetFlow, SNMP, devices)
Automatic topology
Unified KPIs
🔹 Splunk
4
With Splunk (especially Observability Cloud):
APM
Infrastructure
Network monitoring
Logs
KPIs in a single console
2️⃣ What does the customer expect from Instana?

The client wants IBM Instana to:
In the Applications view → see services, traces, and dependencies
In the Infrastructure view → see:
Servers
CPU/Memory
And also network equipment (switches, routers, firewalls)
KPIs such as:
CPU device
Interfaces up/down
Latency
Throughput
Errors
⚠ Here's the important difference:
Instana is APM-first; it's not a native SNMP network monitoring tool like SevOne.

3️⃣ Is what you're proposing possible? Yes, but with the right architecture.

Your idea:

“A remote agent installed on a server queries network devices and sends data to Instana.”
This is technically possible under this model:
🏗 Recommended Architecture
Option 1 — SNMP → Collector → OpenTelemetry → Instana (Recommended)
4
Flow:
Linux server with:
SNMP exporter (e.g., Telegraf, snmp_exporter)
OpenTelemetry Collector
Queryes switches/routers via SNMP
Converts metrics to OTLP
Sends to the Instana agent or directly to the backend
Result in Instana
In the infrastructure view, you would see:
A “logical host”
Custom metrics such as:
network.device.cpu
network.interface.utilization
network.packet.errors
But ⚠ it will not appear as an “automatically detected switch” as a Linux host would.

Regards!

This new functionality will allow us to arrive with a more complete solution and thus be able to face the competition with equal functionalities.