Skip to Main Content
Cloud Management and AIOps


This is an IBM Automation portal for Cloud Management, Technology Cost Management, Network Automation and AIOps products. To view all of your ideas submitted to IBM, create and manage groups of Ideas, or create an idea explicitly set to be either visible by all (public) or visible only to you and IBM (private), use the IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com).

Shape the future of IBM!

We invite you to shape the future of IBM, including product roadmaps, by submitting ideas that matter to you the most. Here's how it works:

Search existing ideas

Start by searching and reviewing ideas and requests to enhance a product or service. Take a look at ideas others have posted, and add a comment, vote, or subscribe to updates on them if they matter to you. If you can't find what you are looking for,

Post your ideas
  1. Post an idea.

  2. Get feedback from the IBM team and other customers to refine your idea.

  3. Follow the idea through the IBM Ideas process.

Specific links you will want to bookmark for future use

Welcome to the IBM Ideas Portal (https://www.ibm.com/ideas) - Use this site to find out additional information and details about the IBM Ideas process and statuses.

IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com) - Use this site to view all of your ideas, create new ideas for any IBM product, or search for ideas across all of IBM.

ideasibm@us.ibm.com - Use this email to suggest enhancements to the Ideas process or request help from IBM for submitting your Ideas.

Status Future consideration
Workspace Instana
Categories Agent
Created by Guest
Created on May 16, 2025

Utilise K8s secrets for InstanaAgent configuration

We are currently using the Instana Agent operator in Red Hat Openshift, and need to configure the Instana Agents. There are several places where use of secrets are in plaintext - this is problematic as we use gitops to manage the configuration of K8s resources, and do not want to put these values into Git.

For example, in this agent YAML we have to specify in plaintext:

  • keystore passwords for TLS authentication
  • mirror username/passwords for the Instana maven repositories if using local mirroring
  • download key for Instana (although maybe necessarily a big problem)
apiVersion: instana.io/v1
kind: InstanaAgent
metadata:
  name: instana-agent
spec:
  agent:
    downloadKey: mydownloadkey
    ...
    configuration_yaml: |
      com.instana.plugin.ibmmq:
        ...
        queueManagers:
          QM1:
            keystore: /opt/instana/agent/etc/instana.jks
            keystorePassword: ************
            cipherSuite: 'TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384'
            channel: INSTANA.A.SVRCONN

    agentReleaseRepoMirrorUrl: 'https://mycompany.com/artifactory/maven-instanafeatures-remote'
    agentReleaseRepoMirrorUsername: mycompanyuser
    agentReleaseRepoMirrorPassword: mycompanypass
    instanaSharedRepoMirrorUrl: 'https://mycompany.com/artifactory/maven-instanashared-remote'
    instanaSharedRepoMirrorUsername: mycompanyuser
    instanaSharedRepoMirrorPassword: mycompanypass

Ideally we would like to be able to point these to a K8s secret name and have the agent pull the values from there instead. This would allow companies to use whatever secrets management tools they wanted to manage/sync K8s secrets separately.

Idea priority High