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Status Future consideration
Workspace Instana
Categories Access Control Infrastructure
Created by Guest
Created on Mar 10, 2026

RELATED IDEAS

Create Automation to Refresh and Update Access Scope of Instana Teams Every "N" Minutes

In large-scale environments where Instana Teams are used to logically segment access across dynamic infrastructures (e.g., Kubernetes, multi-cloud, ephemeral workloads), the resources assigned to a Team’s Access Scope can change frequently.

However, Instana does not automatically refresh or recalculate Access Scopes on short intervals. As a result:

  • Newly created services, workloads, pods, namespaces, resource groups, or infrastructure objects may not appear in the correct Team for several minutes or longer.
  • Users temporarily lose visibility or access to resources they should manage.
  • Automation frameworks dynamically tagging or adjusting metadata (e.g., labels, annotations, custom attributes) do not see team membership updated in real time.
  • Admins often resort to manual team updates or external scripts to compensate.

This causes operational friction, delays in troubleshooting, and inconsistent access governance.

Proposed Solution

Introduce a built-in Instana automation feature that:

  1. Recalculates and updates the Access Scope assignments for all Teams
  2. Runs automatically every 5 minutes (or at a configurable interval)
  3. Ensures that changes in infrastructure, metadata, and discovered entities are reflected in team access without manual intervention
  4. Executes with minimal overhead and is safe for environments with thousands of entities
  5. Provides logs or audit events indicating each refresh cycle

This would behave similarly to other Instana background reconciliation loops, but specific to Access Scope evaluation.

Technical Considerations / Additional Notes

  • Should support configurable intervals: 1, 5, 10, 15 minutes.
  • Needs efficient change detection to avoid unnecessary load on large environments.
  • Could leverage incremental recalculation rather than full rebuilds.
  • Ideally integrated into existing Access Scope rules UI in the Instana Settings page.
  • Optional: Provide an “on-demand refresh” button for admins.
Idea priority Medium
  • Admin
    Máté Návay
    Mar 17, 2026

    Most user created entities can already be dynamically assigned to Teams via team association. This can also be constantly revised based on naming conventions through the API using a script to assure the right Team is always associated based on prefix or other pattern.

    Infrastructure entities are scoped in two main ways today: Correlation to an AP/platform or DFQ filter.
    AP: when a team has access to an AP and permissions to view Infrastructure, they will see infra entities which had matching CALLS on them in the visible Application perspectives. When no calls are made, Instana can no longer be sure the relation is valid.
    Platform: Mostly this applies to team scopes defined on Kubernetes Clusters or Namespaces, these added scopes also apply to Infrastructure area.
    DFQ: The DFQ in team scopes provides ADDITIONAL access on top of the above two inherited infra access, based on the DFQ filter statement. Whatever entity matches the DFQ statement in the scope will be visible for users in Infra area, regardless of calls happening in an AP in scope.


    Planned improvements:

    We're planning to create "perspectives" for the Infrastructure area to replicate the capabilities of Application perspectives. This will allow admins to create Infra perspectives, where they can define a filter, similar to what is available in Infra Analytics view and entities matching this filter will always be part of the perspective. Team scopes than can refer the Infra perspectives for access and whenever new entities are added (or removed) as long as they match the perspective filter, will be in the scope of the team.



    Visibility of new entities are not delayed artificially. As soon as tag propagation happens and a DFQ filter returns the new entity, they should immediately become visible for limited scope users.

    Reply

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