Skip to Main Content
Cloud Management and AIOps


This is an IBM Automation portal for Cloud Management, Technology Cost Management, Network Automation and AIOps products. To view all of your ideas submitted to IBM, create and manage groups of Ideas, or create an idea explicitly set to be either visible by all (public) or visible only to you and IBM (private), use the IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com).

Shape the future of IBM!

We invite you to shape the future of IBM, including product roadmaps, by submitting ideas that matter to you the most. Here's how it works:

Search existing ideas

Start by searching and reviewing ideas and requests to enhance a product or service. Take a look at ideas others have posted, and add a comment, vote, or subscribe to updates on them if they matter to you. If you can't find what you are looking for,

Post your ideas
  1. Post an idea.

  2. Get feedback from the IBM team and other customers to refine your idea.

  3. Follow the idea through the IBM Ideas process.

Specific links you will want to bookmark for future use

Welcome to the IBM Ideas Portal (https://www.ibm.com/ideas) - Use this site to find out additional information and details about the IBM Ideas process and statuses.

IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com) - Use this site to view all of your ideas, create new ideas for any IBM product, or search for ideas across all of IBM.

ideasibm@us.ibm.com - Use this email to suggest enhancements to the Ideas process or request help from IBM for submitting your Ideas.

Status Future consideration
Workspace Instana
Categories Node
Created by Guest
Created on Nov 30, 2022

Improve reliability of sending data to Instana

We have been observing regular connection failures (about 100 within a week for about a dozen services), when the Node agent was attempting to send data to the Instana servers. The error message was often related to timeouts:

Error received while trying to send snapshot data and metrics: Failed to send data to agent via POST ... Ran into a timeout.

There is currently no retry implemented, so this data will actually be lost.


Our feature request is to:

  1. Allow users to customise the timeout, which is currently hard-coded.

  2. Implement a retry for failed requests.


Idea priority High
  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Dec 14, 2022

    Thanks for reaching out.

    We will make the timeout configurable.
    We do not plan to add retry logic for failed requests as Node.js Collector and Instana Host Agent live in the same host so it failed requests mostly would due to misconfiguration. Due to the amount of telemetry data a retry logic could heavily impact the throughput and eventually crash the app.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Nov 30, 2022

    In a distributed system clients should always be built in a way that they retry to send important information that otherwise gets lost.

    In my understanding this is rather a bug in the node library maintained by Instana (Node.js Collector) than a new idea. We decided to go with Instana as SaaS to not care about monitoring the monitoring system ourselves.