Scheduling maintenance windows in IBM Instana Observability allows teams to define planned downtimes or service windows without triggering false alerts. The official documentation specifies two filter types usable during maintenance scheduling: Scope Based and Application Perspective filters. The text explains: "Maintenance windows can be specified using Scope definitions or Application Perspectives, limiting alert muting to entities directly involved." Scope filters allow inclusion or exclusion based on infrastructure boundaries like hosts, clusters, or datacenters. Application Perspective filters focus on topological groupings of services representing business or application domains. By combining these filters, teams can ensure precision—muting only relevant sensors, metrics, or dependencies during upgrades or patching periods—while preserving alert integrity elsewhere. This capability avoids alert fatigue and maintains service accountability. Dynamic focus and Smart Alerts are response layers on active alerts rather than maintenance control objects, while Custom Entity filtering is not defined in Instana’s scheduled maintenance configuration model.

IBM Instana documents the merge logic of custom payloads for alerts and global configurations very clearly. The rule states: "If the same key is defined in both a global custom payload and an alert-specific payload, the value from the alert-specific payload will override the global value for that key." This ensures alert context management is precise, enabling targeted incident response with the most relevant and high-priority data. There is no concatenation, and no alert cancellation or error is triggered as Instana resolves key collisions silently by giving precedence to the more granular, context-specific setting (alert-level). This verified behavior guarantees custom alert events always contain relevant payloads, supporting accurate automated remediation or escalation.

According to IBM Instana Observability documentation, the Infrastructure map’s primary goal is to present a real-time, interactive graphical overview of monitored hosts, nodes, VMs, and cloud instances, organized by zones or clusters. The verified statement is: "The Infrastructure map provides a dynamic, interactive view of all monitored systems—grouping resources by logical or physical zones and delivering actionable context for troubleshooting and planning." Users can zoom, filter, and select entities to drill into system health and configuration, identify relationships, and pinpoint issues in geographic or topological layouts. Static images are not produced; instead, the map updates in real-time as agents detect new hosts, containers, or state changes, reflecting additions, removals, or migrations instantly. Option D describes the Service map, which visualizes application and service dependencies rather than the underlying infrastructure. Thus, C best matches the IBM documented description for Infrastructure map functionality.

According to IBM Instana Observability (v1.0.307 and earlier), stanctl cluster backup is a built-in utility and command-line tool to back up system state and operational data from an Instana cluster. The verified procedure reads: "stanctl cluster backup saves configuration, operational state, and selected monitoring data into an archive file located in the current working directory." This archive is designed for disaster recovery and migration, containing all crucial files needed for restoring Instana to a consistent state. Disk snapshots (A) are separate and handled by storage appliances. Option B describes pre-backup preparation rather than the actual result. Remote backup (C) operations require remote execution configuration and are not part of the default cluster backup. Thus, D is correct as per documentation, which emphasizes bringing together all cluster backup data in a portable .tar or .zip archive for safe storage or transfer.

Per IBM Instana's security documentation, management of two-factor authentication (2FA) is controlled directly via administrative functions in the web UI. The guidance reads: "Administrators can remove a user’s 2FA association by navigating to Settings > Users, choosing the user, and using the remove or reset 2FA option in the UI." This workflow is safe, auditable, and leaves a traceable event in the audit log, satisfying enterprise security policy requirements. Direct API or CLI deletion of 2FA is not the recommended (or documented) method for Instana-managed users, and database-level manipulation (D) is unsupported as it risks data corruption. The UI approach is verified for both on-premises and SaaS installations.

According to the official IBM Instana Observability documentation (v1.0.304), retention policy settings in Custom Edition are NOT configured in a custom resource called "StorageConf." Instead, they are configured as properties within the CoreSpec of the Core custom resource. The documentation explicitly states: "Overwriting the default retention settings is optional and should only be done consciously. These retention setting values are configured as properties in the CoreSpec." The actual configuration looks like this:

text

kind: Core

metadata:

name: instana-core

namespace: instana-core

spec:

properties:

- name: retention.metrics.rollup5

value: "86400"

- name: config.appdata.shortterm.retention.days

value: "7"

- name: config.synthetics.retention.days

value: "60"

The retention policies for infrastructure metrics, application data, and synthetic monitoring are all configured as properties within the Core spec, not in a separate "StorageConf" custom resource. "StorageConf" refers to storage configurations for raw spans (S3, GCS, Azure), not retention policies.

Audit logging is a core component of security compliance within IBM Instana. The Access Logs, a section under Audit Logs, are specifically designed to capture and display authentication-related events. IBM states: "Access logs in Instana record user login and logout activity, including timestamps, user IDs, and source IP addresses." This capability supports auditing, regulatory needs, and incident response by ensuring verifiable tracking of system access. Instana separates audit events into categories for clarity: user actions, configuration edits, and security operations, with host-based access details residing in the ‘Access Logs’ view. This delineation enables administrators to spot unauthorized or suspicious access attempts quickly. Additions of new users or API tokens fall under distinct event categories (‘User Management’ and ‘API Audit Logs’) but not under the Access logs specifically. Through its clear segregation of logs by purpose, Instana ensures that organizations maintain compliance with frameworks like ISO 27001, SOC 2, and internal IT governance policy, as access auditability provides both transparency and accountability across multi-user environments.