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Status Submitted
Workspace Instana
Categories Kubernetes
Created by Guest
Created on Aug 13, 2025

RELATED IDEAS

Add Native Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA) Support for instana-agent-k8sensor in Instana Helm Chart

The Instana Helm chart for instana-agent-k8sensor currently does not support native Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA) configuration.


During a recent incident (Case TS020011638), a memory usage spike occurred post-AMI update, reaching 140% of the configured limit. Since HPA is not natively supported, scaling adjustments had to be performed manually by modifying replicas and resource requests. This adds operational overhead and delays incident mitigation, especially in production environments where load spikes can happen unexpectedly.

Business Impact:

  • Without native HPA, instana-agent-k8sensor cannot automatically respond to load changes.

  • Manual scaling requires engineering involvement, increasing MTTR during critical events.

  • Risk of monitoring blind spots if agents restart or crash under load before manual scaling can be applied.

  • Impacts overall reliability of Instana monitoring in Kubernetes clusters.

Proposed Solution:

  • Enhance the Instana Helm chart to include configurable HPA support for instana-agent-k8sensor.

  • Provide Helm values to control:

    • Enable/Disable HPA

    • Minimum/Maximum replicas

    • Target CPU/Memory utilization thresholds

  • Ensure compatibility with Kubernetes metrics-server for metrics collection.

  • Include documentation and usage examples for enabling/tuning HPA.

Idea priority Urgent

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