Introduction:

In an Enterprise Context, Instana contains valueable informations about running software on single machines or clusters, when an Agent is installed.

With the current API it is hard to replicate UI functionalities, like showing all processes/applications on a single host due to a missing common queryable ID.

Currently the API: {{baseUrl}}/api/infrastructure-monitoring/snapshots 

can take a parameter query, to use a DFQN to query the needed snapshots.

With the given SnapshotId then detailed information can be gathered:

{{baseUrl}}/api/infrastructure-monitoring/snapshots/{SnapshotId}

It could be queried for hosts like:

/api/infrastructure-monitoring/snapshots?windowSize=3600000&query=entity.selfType:host&size=5000

Problem:

All Snapshots contain an EntityId, which seems to be a compound key that identiefies a snapshot additionaly to the ID.

"entityId": {
"host": "EC2-i-0008aaaa",
"pluginId": "com.instana.forge.infrastructure.webserver.httpd.Httpd",
"steadyId": "695" },

The interesting Part of the ID, is the host field, which seems to identify the host the Snapshot is running on and which would be very helpful to query, to get all snapshots of an Host.

The problem is, that this host field can not be queried with an DFQN.

Use-Cases:

• Get Inventory for Environments. e.g. for CMDB / EAM.

• Custom business workflows, with custom tags on machines or containers.

  • Comparing different environment configurations

• many more...

Improvement suggestion:

Add to DFQN the ability to query the EntityId object. Specialy the host field.

This way, it would be possible to fullfil the usecases very easyly.

e.g.

entity.id.host: "EC2-i-0008aaaa"

Workarounds

A possible workaround would be at the moment to use the FQDN of the host in the query. But this field could be non unique in some conditions.