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Status Planned for future release
Workspace Instana
Categories Agent
Created by Guest
Created on Jul 16, 2026

RELATED IDEAS

Ability to use wildcards/regex to ignore/blacklist processes from monitoring

Hi,

During the rollout phase we need to exclude a serious amount of batch jobs and other processes, most of the java based, from monitoring/tracing.

The documented process: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/instana-observability?topic=cha-configuring-host-agents-by-using-agent-configuration-file#ignoring-processes__title__1 doesn't work as currently the ignore by arguments only allows complete strings. It doesn neither offer a "contains" nor a "startsWith" or "endsWith" or ideally a regex.

Many of the jobs have commandline arguments which differ at one section e.g.

/dir/service-id-1/soft/slot/scripts/../batch-jobs/JobsAll/myJobs-SNAPSHOT.jar

/dir/service-id-2/soft/slot/scripts/../batch-jobs/JobsAll/myJobs-SNAPSHOT.jar

But there are others with more complex scenarios.

As we are talking about 1000s of processes the use of a process env variable for exclusion is not feasible as this triggers a rather lenghty process in our organisation and touches several hundred teams.

Hence a regex capable or at least substring aware arguments exclusion via the configuration.yaml is the onyl feasible way to go for us.

Many thanks for a fast consideration and thumbs up,

Regards,

Rainer

Idea priority High
  • Admin
    Henning Treu
    Jul 23, 2026

    Hi Rainer,

    our plan to support this use-case is to extend Selective Monitoring. We will provide an agent-based configuration in configuration.yaml and provide a new notation to use regex for process exclusion (or inclusion in case of OPT_IN mode). The existing setting for com.instana.ignore is then considered legacy and will be replaced by the more powerful Selective Monitoring setting.


    Best regards

    Henning Treu - Product Manager Instana Agent

    Reply

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