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From an Instana perspective, this request makes sense from a cost control and scoping standpoint, especially in large Nutanix environments.
However, it’s important to highlight how Instana is designed:
Instana follows a full-stack, automatic discovery model, where once the agent is deployed on a host, it will automatically discover and monitor all VMs and services running on that infrastructure.
This design ensures complete topology visibility and dependency mapping, which is one of the core strengths of the platform.
That said, I see three relevant angles to this request:
1. Current limitation (Nutanix vs vSphere)
For vSphere, there has been progress in allowing more granular control (as referenced in INSTANA-I-4349), but for Nutanix, this level of selective VM monitoring is not natively available today.
2. Possible workarounds
Depending on the use case, some alternatives can be considered:
- Agent-based control
Deploy Instana agents only on selected VMs (for application-level observability).
- Tagging & filtering
Use tags to logically group and filter monitored entities, even if they are discovered.
- Infrastructure-level scoping
Limit where agents are deployed (specific hosts or clusters).
3. Architectural trade-off
Restricting VM monitoring introduces a trade-off:
- Better cost control and reduced noise
- Loss of full dependency mapping and automatic root cause analysis accuracy
This is especially relevant in Nutanix environments, where cluster-level behavior and storage/network interactions (AHV + AOS) can impact workloads beyond a single VM.
My Recommendation
I would strongly support this feature as an enhancement, particularly for:
- Large-scale environments
- Customers with strict licensing or cost constraints
- Managed service providers needing scoped monitoring per tenant
At the same time, it would be important that any implementation:
- Preserves topology integrity where possible
- Allows policy-based inclusion/exclusion (e.g., via tags or naming patterns)