Must-Gather tools required for the Instana Agent

The Tiger Team is working with support an others on a tool called Tiger-Optics that is using AI to analyze Must-Gather data from customers to help accelerate problem diagnostics. So far we have done work to process data for the backend. This is partly due to the fact that we have a must-gather tool to collect data from kubernetes and the Instana backend.

What is lacking today is a consistent way of gathering Agent Must-Gather data from a customer. For example:

• In the Instana UI, there are separate tools for gathering the logs vs. gathering the "collect support information".

• Ideally, the "collect support information would collect everything that is needed by support. Given that logs might be large (10 files of 5 MB each), it might make sense to collect only the most recent 2 logs with an option to collect more.

• In addition, it would be very useful to also collect the configuration.yaml file(s) as well as other key configuration files such as the mvn-settings.xml, com.instana.agent.main.sender.Backend.cfg and com.instana.agent.main.config.Agent.cfg files. However, some of these files may contain sensitive data. So, we should ask the customer whether they will allow us to collect them.

• We also need to have the the same mechanism in place to gather the files and configuration information when running locally on the Agent. Some Instana users do NOT have access to the administrative capabilities via the UI.

• Finally, we should look at the "stanctl diagnostics" command. It gathers a wealth of data from kubernetes. A lot of that could be reused by the Agent.

  • alternatively, have the agent provide an endpoint to trigger MustGather data