API-Based Configuration Export and Import for Backend Configuration Management

Hi, while defining a staging strategy for a highly regulated banking environment to deploy and run Instana backends, we ran into the challenge how to promote configurations from a dev/staging backend to the production one:

Problem Statement
As a customer operating multiple Instana backend stages (e.g., acceptance testing and production), we need the ability to export and import backend configurations via API. Currently, there is no way to extract backend configurations (application perspectives, tags, alerts, dashboards, views) from one Instana backend stage and import them into another stage.

This forces us to manually recreate all configurations in each environment, which is:
• Time-consuming and error-prone
• Difficult to maintain consistency across stages
• Challenging when production has different naming conventions or higher cardinality than test environments

We need an API that allows us to:

1. Export backend configurations from a source stage as configuration files (YAML, JSON, or similar format)

2. Import the modified configuration files into a target stage via API

3. Update flag. Existing configs should be updateable via this mechanism – e.g. Application Perspectives will throw an error when you try to add a new one with an already existing name through the API. Hence a flag „create/update“ can be set to allow overwriting of existing configs.

Without this API-based export/import capability, we cannot automate configuration promotion between stages, leading to manual work, configuration drift, and slower deployment cycles.

Value Proposition
• Configuration Portability: Export configurations from one backend and import them into another
• Automation Enablement: Enable automated configuration promotion through CI/CD pipelines
• Reduced Manual Effort: Eliminate manual recreation of configurations across stages
• Consistency Across Stages: Ensure identical configurations between test and production environments
• Faster Deployment: Accelerate rollout of monitoring configurations to new stages
• Error Reduction: Eliminate manual copy-paste errors through automated import/export
• Flexibility: Modify exported configurations externally before importing to adapt to different environments

Thanks and regards,

Rainer