An SRE team deployed the Instana agent as a DaemonSet on their Kubernetes cluster. All agent pods are running and reporting healthy, but pods in the newly created 'billing-service' namespace are not appearing in Instana. What is the most likely cause?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation and Infographic
If the agent pods are healthy but a specific namespace is missing, the most likely cause is that the namespace was explicitly added to the exclusion list in the agent's configuration (agent.yaml), which suppresses monitoring for that namespace. The DaemonSet by default monitors all pods on its node across all namespaces when RBAC is correctly configured. Separate DaemonSets per namespace and sidecar containers are not required for standard Instana Kubernetes monitoring.
Full explanation below image
Full Explanation
If the agent pods are healthy but a specific namespace is missing, the most likely cause is that the namespace was explicitly added to the exclusion list in the agent's configuration (agent.yaml), which suppresses monitoring for that namespace. The DaemonSet by default monitors all pods on its node across all namespaces when RBAC is correctly configured. Separate DaemonSets per namespace and sidecar containers are not required for standard Instana Kubernetes monitoring. The correct answer is 'The billing-service namespace was added to the agent's exclusion list in the agent configuration'. The incorrect options — 'The Instana DaemonSet lacks a ClusterRole permission required for the billing-service namespace', 'The agent must be redeployed with a new DaemonSet scoped to each new namespace', 'Pod-level monitoring requires a sidecar container alongside each pod in the namespace' — are wrong because they do not align with IBM Instana's architecture or recommended practices for this scenario. Understanding this concept is essential for the Domain 1: Operations domain of the IBM Instana Observability certification.