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Status Submitted
Workspace Instana
Categories Kubernetes
Created by Guest
Created on Feb 3, 2026

RELATED IDEAS

Add Smart Alert Support for Container “Memory Usage Percentage” Metric

We would like to submit an enhancement request on behalf of Sobeys, who are actively using Instana to monitor their containerized applications running on Kubernetes/OpenShift.

Enhancement Needed

Add support for the metric “Container Memory Usage Percentage” within Smart Alerts, allowing users to create threshold‑based alerts directly tied to the true memory pressure of a container.

Current Limitation

Today, Instana Smart Alerts do not expose the container‑level metric:

Memory Usage %

This prevents customers from being able to create alerts based on actual memory saturation of a pod/container. While Instana exposes memory usage and limits as separate metrics, Smart Alerts currently cannot express this as a percentage, nor can it alert on it directly.

As a result:

  • Users cannot alert when containers approach OOMKill risk.
  • Instana may report higher memory usage than OpenShift due to differences in measurement semantics, but without Memory Usage %, customers cannot determine the true severity.
  • Teams cannot create simple and intuitive alerts such as “Alert me when this container reaches 80% of its memory limit.”

This is considered a critical monitoring gap.

Container memory percentage usage is the primary signal used across Kubernetes observability platforms (K8s dashboard, OpenShift console, Prometheus, Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, etc.) for:

  • Preventing OOMKills
  • Detecting memory leaks
  • Capacity planning
  • Autoscaling safety
  • SLA/SLO compliance

Having this available in Instana Smart Alerts is essential for accurate and safe production operations.

Urgency

Sobeys is currently onboarding Instana for mission‑critical workloads. This enhancement is required for them to rely on Instana for real‑time memory health monitoring.

Please let us know if the product team needs additional context, dashboard examples, or details from our recent Instana vs. OpenShift memory discrepancy analysis Case number: TS021323228

Thank you.

Idea priority Urgent

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