Pass the IBM IBM Instana Observability C1000-189 Questions and answers with CertsForce

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.

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.

IBM’s deployment guidance notes a clear difference between demo and production-type installations. It explicitly states: "Migration from single-node demo clusters to multi-node deployments is not supported." Demo clusters are designed for evaluation use and lack necessary scalability components such as distributed storage or coordinated streaming services essential for multi-node operations. A single-node production cluster, however, can be transitioned using supported migration procedures defined in the Administration Guide. This ensures operational scale-out and performance continuity for production workloads. Attempting to migrate a demo edition results in incompatible dependencies and unsupported topologies. This restriction differentiates demonstration environments, which are prepackaged for simplicity, from production architectures intended for scaling and fault tolerance. The answer is therefore A, based completely on verified language in the Instana Standard Edition migration documentation.

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.

When integrating Grafana with Instana, the plugin communicates using RESTful interactions over the HTTP protocol. IBM’s integration guide clearly explains: "The Instana DataSource Plugin for Grafana communicates with the Instana backend via HTTP-based REST APIs to query metrics and event data." This ensures secure TLS-encrypted data transport and allows compatibility with Grafana’s native data source management features. HTTP is chosen due to its simplicity, standardization, and suitability for web API integrations, allowing Grafana to query time-series data from Instana and automatically populate dashboards. The plugin retrieves metrics, trace-level summaries, and service health states over HTTP GET and POST requests. Other options such as gRPC are used only internally between microservices, SOP is not a standard communication protocol, and JDBC is limited to databases. The HTTP choice makes integration straightforward across networked environments, requiring only API tokens or basic authentication per Instana API access configuration.

IBM Instana documentation is explicit: some action definitions, including default and built-in (such as Ansible) actions supplied by the platform, cannot be manually deleted by users or admins. It states: "Default Actions—including Ansible integration actions pre-defined by Instana—are protected from manual deletion to ensure availability and platform integrity." This ensures that core automation integrations remain functional and the baseline for remediations, regardless of user error or misconfiguration. Custom or imported actions can be removed, but defaults—tagged as such in the UI—are non-removable, safeguarding operational continuity and maintaining standardized integrations across manual and automated workflows. Active status or name presence does not impact deletion ability; it is the default/built-in status (D) that enforces this lock.

IBM Instana integrates natively with Prometheus to unify metric ingestion without disrupting existing telemetry setups. The configuration parameter remote_write enables this linkage. The official documentation states: "The remote_write configuration enables Prometheus to send data to Instana, where those metrics are displayed either as Prometheus entities or merged into process custom metrics." Instead of storing them only within Prometheus, Instana pulls remote_write relay feeds to create comprehensive, unified metrics views in its dashboard. This approach avoids duplicate monitoring systems and allows alerting across both Prometheus and Instana data seamlessly. The parameter does not configure outbound writing by Instana back into Prometheus—data always flows from Prometheus to Instana in this architecture. This integration respects Prometheus scraping principles yet centralizes analysis within Instana, achieving correlation between imported numerical time-series values and native metrics at the application or process layer.

Enabling advanced features in Instana Self-Hosted Custom Edition requires administrators to add or adjust feature flags in the core configuration file, as per IBM's setup documentation. Specifically: "Feature enablement in Instana Self-Hosted Custom Edition is controlled via feature flags set in the core configuration file, allowing platform-wide updates at startup." Modifying deployment settings may affect resources or endpoints but does not toggle internal features. Unit-level configuration affects only specific microservices, not centralized capabilities. Restarting the backend is necessary after changing configuration but is not itself a feature-enabling action. The central core configuration file, located under the main configuration directory, contains comprehensive toggles for features spanning UI, backend, and data processing pipelines. Only changes made here and saved with appropriate syntax will activate platform features on next start or reload.