What is Instana’s custom built software that is designed to monitor a specified technology?

Instana uses Sensors as specialized software components embedded within its agents to monitor and extract telemetry from various supported technologies. The verified documentation states: "Sensors are built-in modules that detect, identify, and monitor specific technologies such as databases, servers, run-times, and messaging systems." These components ensure that the agent collects targeted metrics, events, and traces optimized for individual stacks like MySQL, Kafka, or Java. When deployed, the Instana agent automatically discovers technologies running in the environment and loads corresponding Sensors dynamically, requiring minimal user configuration. Tracers handle transaction propagation, Profiling covers code-level performance, and Service is a higher abstraction in application topology—not individual monitoring logic. The Sensor concept remains core to Instana’s automatic discovery and observability architecture as validated in IBM’s architectural reference sections.