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Implement observability for Amazon EKS workloads using the Instana Amazon EKS Add-on

When customers deploy containerized workloads using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), having visibility into their distributed microservices and their dependencies helps them maintain reliable application performance.

Instana Observability (Instana) offers an Amazon EKS Add-on that deploys Instana agents to Amazon EKS clusters. Customers can use this add-on to collect and analyze real-time performance data to gain insights into their containerized applications.

In this blog, you’ll learn how to deploy the Instana Amazon EKS Add-on by subscribing to the Instana Observability Operator directly from the Amazon EKS Console. You will also learn the architecture and implementation steps required to establish monitoring for your Amazon EKS clusters and workloads.

Enhancing Visibility in Amazon EKS Environments

Amazon EKS lets you run Kubernetes container workloads that dynamically scale across nodes based on demand. Implementing effective observability practices helps you improve application availability and stability of your environment. With Instana monitoring you can:

  • Track communication between services across your infrastructure to identify optimization opportunities and ensure consistent performance.
  • Access correlated logs, metrics, and traces to understand system behavior and resolve issues efficiently.
  • Maintain visibility as your Kubernetes clusters evolve, regardless of how your workloads grow or change.

Instana Amazon EKS Add-on

The Instana Amazon EKS add-on provides visibility across your Kubernetes environments. Once deployed, the Instana agent automatically discovers components within your Amazon EKS clusters including nodes, namespaces, deployments, services, and pods. The agent collects performance metrics at 1-second intervals and implements automated code instrumentation for languages like Java, Node.js, and .NET without requiring manual configuration.

Instana builds dependency maps showing relationships between applications, containers, and infrastructure components, while tracing end-to-end requests across services. The collected data appears in a unified monitoring dashboard that displays health metrics for your Kubernetes orchestration layer alongside application performance data. This approach allows you to correlate configuration changes with performance impacts.

Reference Architecture

The following diagram shows how the Instana Amazon EKS Add-on is deployed in an Amazon EKS cluster:

This diagram shows the solution architecture for the IBM Instana add-on for Amazon EKS communicating with the Instana SaaS.

Figure 1. Reference architecture of the Instana Amazon EKS Add-on.

The architecture consists of these four main components:

  • Instana Operator: Installed as an Amazon EKS add-on, this component manages the deployment and lifecycle of Instana custom resources, such as the Agent DaemonSet, ConfigMaps, and Secrets, ensuring they stay in the desired state within your Amazon EKS cluster.
  • Instana Agent: Deployed as a DaemonSet, the Instana Agent automatically discovers and instruments hosts, containers, and Kubernetes-level entities to collect metrics, traces, and logs from every node in your Amazon EKS cluster.
  • Data Collection: The Instana Agent includes collectors that gather metrics, traces, logs, and events from your Amazon EKS environment. On the Instana Backend, the data is optimized through aggregation, compression, and batching to improve resource usage. The data is then further processed to support the analytics and visualizations you see in the Instana UI. Instana persists data in stateful stores and supports encryption of data at rest in stateful stores.
  • Instana Backend: Serves as the central storage and analytics system for your observability data. You can choose between a fully managed SaaS on AWS, or self-host deployed in your own AWS account. In this architecture we are using the fully managed SaaS backend. The backend processes the collected data and makes it available through the Instana UI through HTTPS and TLS encryption.

Key Capabilities

The Instana Amazon EKS Add-on includes the following capabilities:

  • AWS-native deployment: You can install the add-on using the AWS Management Console or AWS CLI, integrating with your existing AWS workflows and simplifying configuration.
  • High-resolution monitoring: Collect metrics at 1-second intervals and capture distributed traces for every request, providing detailed visibility into your services and infrastructure.
  • Dynamic service mapping: Automatically discover resources and visualize dependencies between services across your Amazon EKS environment.
  • Pattern detection: Apply algorithms to detect anomalies and identify potential issues before they affect your applications.
  • Operational scalability: Maintain monitoring effectiveness across clusters of various sizes as your workloads grow and evolve.

Prerequisites

Before installing the Instana Amazon EKS add-on, you need:

  • Familiarity with AWS, specifically Amazon EKS, and Instana.
  • Access to an AWS account with permissions to create the resources described in the Implementation steps
  • An active Amazon EKS cluster. For instructions on creating an Amazon EKS cluster, see Create an Amazon EKS cluster.
  • A workstation with the AWS CLI, eksctl and kubectl installed and configured.
  • An active subscription to Instana. You can start with an Instana free trial from AWS Marketplace.
  • An Instana license key, which you can generate after logging in to the Instana platform. Used in step 15 of the Implementation Steps section.

Costs

By implementing this solution, you’ll incur costs for AWS services such as Amazon EKS, Amazon EC2, Amazon VPC, data transfer and others. For current pricing information, see Amazon EKS Pricing, Amazon EC2 Pricing, and Amazon VPC Pricing.

Additionally, you will also incur costs for the Instana subscription after the free trial period ends. You’ll be billed according to the Instana subscription plan you select on AWS Marketplace.

To estimate your monthly costs, you can use the AWS Pricing Calculator. Remember to delete resources when they’re no longer needed, as described in the cleanup section, to avoid unnecessary charges.

Implementation Steps

Installing the Instana add-on

  1. Navigate to the Amazon EKS Console.
  2. In the left navigation pane, choose Clusters.
  3. Choose the name of the cluster where you want to install the Instana EKS Add-on.
  4. Choose the Add-ons tab below the Cluster info
  5. Choose Get more add-ons.
  6. On the Select add-ons page, scroll down to the AWS Marketplace add-ons section and enter Instana in the search field (Figure 2).
Amazon EKS console shows how to search for Instana in the AWS Marketplace add-ons.

Figure 2. Search for Instana in the AWS Marketplace add-ons.

  1. Select the IBM Instana Observability Operator add-on and choose Next.
  2. On the Configure selected add-ons settings page, choose View subscription options to open the Subscription options
  3. Review the Pricing details and Legal sections, then choose the Subscribe button to continue (Figure 3).
Amazon EKS console showing how to review the options and subscribe to the IBM Instana Observability Operator.

Figure 3. Review the options and subscribe to the IBM Instana Observability Operator.

  1. Select the latest available version from the Version dropdown list and choose Next.
  2. On the Review and add page, choose Create.
  3. After the Instana add-on installation is complete, you will see a message in the cluster overview dashboard informing you that the add-on was successfully added to the cluster (Figure 4).
The Amazon EKS console shows a message indicating the successful installation of the Instana add-on in your Amazon EKS cluster.

Figure 4. Message indicating the successful installation of the Instana add-on in your Amazon EKS cluster.

  1. Log in to your Instana tenant User Interface, for more help visit Instana UI documentation.
  2. From the navigation menu choose More > Agents > Install agents.
  3. Select Kubernetes Operator (Figure 5).
Instana console where you have to enter your Amazon EKS cluster name and copy the customer resource YAML file definition.

Figure 5. Enter your Amazon EKS cluster name and copy the customer resource YAML file definition.

  1. In the Instana UI, for Step 2 of the agent installation process, enter the name of the Amazon EKS cluster you selected earlier in step 3, and specify an optional zone name for the agent configuration.
  2. Choose the Copy button under Step 3: Configure the custom resource YAML file.
  3. Create a local file named instana-agent.yaml on your workstation or bastion host. In this file, paste the YAML content you copied from the Instana UI in the previous step. This file contains the Instana Agent CustomResource with the necessary basic configuration values.
  4. Apply the Instana Agent CustomResource to your Amazon EKS cluster using the following command:
$ kubectl apply -f instana-agent.yaml
Bash
  1. Verify that the Instana Agent is running (Figure 6):
$ kubectl get pods -n instana-agent
Bash
From your Amazon EKS bastion host, you can use kubectl to view the Instana Agent pods running on your Amazon EKS cluster.

Figure 6. Instana Agent pods running on Amazon EKS cluster.

  1. Confirm that logs are being collected by running:
$ kubectl logs -n instana-agent \
  -l app.kubernetes.io/name=instana-agent
Bash
  1. Navigate to the Instana SaaS dashboard and validate that your cluster data is visible (Figure 7).
Instana dashboard shows . Amazon EKS cluster data available in Instana after the addon has been installed.

Figure 7. Amazon EKS cluster data available in Instana.

Cleanup Instructions

To remove the Instana Operator and clean up your Amazon EKS environment, follow these steps:

  1. Delete the Instana Agent CustomResource from the local file you created in step 16:
$ kubectl delete -f instana-agent.yaml
Bash
  1. Uninstall the Instana Add-on:
$ aws eks delete-addon --cluster-name <replace-eks-cluster-name> --addon-name ibm-software_instana-cluster-monitoring
Bash
  1. Remove any remaining resources:
kubectl delete namespace instana-agent
Bash
  1. Delete the Amazon EKS cluster if you no longer need it.
  2. Unsubscribe from Instana on AWS Marketplace if you no longer need it.

Summary

The Instana Amazon EKS add-on provides Kubernetes observability for your Amazon EKS environments. This add-on helps you maintain visibility, diagnose issues quickly and optimize application performance.

In this post, you learned how to:

  • Deploy the Instana Amazon EKS Add-on through the AWS Management Console.
  • Configure the Instana agent to monitor your Kubernetes environment.
  • Understand how Instana integrates with AWS services to provide full-stack observability.
  • Use Instana to monitor your containerized applications.

To start monitoring your Amazon EKS workloads, visit the Instana Observability listing on AWS Marketplace and deploy the Amazon EKS add-on. You can begin with a free trial of IBM Instana from the AWS Marketplace.

Additional Content:

Visit the AWS Marketplace for IBM Instana solutions available on AWS:

Eduardo Monich Fronza

Eduardo Monich Fronza

Eduardo Monich Fronza is a Partner Solutions Architect at AWS. His experience includes Cloud, solutions architecture, application platforms, containers, workload modernization, and hybrid solutions. In his current role, Eduardo helps AWS partners and customers in their cloud adoption journey.

Henning Treu

Henning Treu

Henning Treu is a Senior Product Manager at IBM Instana. With 25+ years of experience in the software industry, he bridges customer requirements, innovative ideas and engineering challenges with one goal focused: solve real world problems and provide customer value. For IBM Instana, Henning cares about the on-prem data collection part of the product experience, mainly in the form of Instana Agent.

Milica Cvrkota

Milica Cvrkota

Milica Cvrkota is a Software Developer and Team Lead at IBM Instana. She works on the Instana Agent, building features, fixing issues, and improving the performance, across host and Kubernetes environments, with a strong focus on Kubernetes-based monitoring and observability for containerized workloads.

Thanos Matzanas

Thanos Matzanas

Thanos Matzanas is a Staff Product Manager and the AWS Alliance Lead for IBM Instana. He has been in the monitoring and observability field for over a decade focusing on helping clients achieve business goals from the use of observability solutions. In his current role, he leads the product’s integrations with AWS and focusing on increasing Instana’s visibility within the AWS ecosystem.