An infrastructure team is preparing to upgrade an on-premises Instana Standard Edition backend from version 275 to version 277. The Instana administrator must identify the most critical step to complete before executing the Instana update command on the backend server. What must be done first?

Creating a full backup of all Instana data stores, including Cassandra, Clickhouse, and Elasticsearch, along with all configuration files, is a mandatory prerequisite documented in the Instana backend upgrade guide before any version migration. This backup provides the only reliable path to rollback if the upgrade encounters errors or causes data corruption. Instana supports in-place upgrades using the update command without requiring a prior uninstall, and agents maintain backward compatibility with newer backend versions so a pre-upgrade agent update is not required. The correct answer is 'Create a complete backup of all Instana data stores and configuration files before running the update command'. The incorrect options — 'Upgrade all 500 monitored Instana host agents to version 277 compatibility mode before upgrading the backend', 'Perform a full uninstall of Instana version 275 to ensure a clean environment before installing version 277', 'Update all underlying operating system packages on the backend server to versions required by Instana 277' — 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 3: Installation domain of the IBM Instana Observability certification.