IBM Instana Observability MCP Server

Overview

The IBM Instana Observability MCP Server brings conversational observability to developers building on AWS. This listing allows you to deploy the Instana MCP Server into your AWS or local environment. Powered by the open Model Context Protocol (MCP), this server exposes more than 100 Instana tools as AI-accessible endpoints so assistants like Amazon Q Developer CLI and Kiro can query Instana using natural language. Instead of navigating dashboards or writing custom REST calls, developers can simply ask questions like:

• Show me three applications with their health status?

• What were the Kubernetes events in the last three hours?

• Which applications have at least one AWS EC2 instance associated with them? Behind the scenes, the Instana MCP Server translates these prompts into precise Instana API calls, validates parameters, handles pagination, and returns structured responses that AI agents can explain and summarize. From there, developers and SREs can explore Instana observability data directly from their terminal or IDE. Licensing and requirements:

• The MCP Server itself is free to deploy from AWS Marketplace.

• An active Instana subscription (SaaS or Self-Hosted) is required to access data.

• New users can start with an Instana free trial or Instana Pay-As-You-Go offering on AWS Marketplace at https://ibm.biz/aws_marketplace-instana_paygo 

Highlights

• Rich library of tools for full-stack observability: The Instana MCP Server exposes more than 100 purpose-built tools that map directly to Instana APIs - including application metrics, endpoint performance, infrastructure hosts, Kubernetes events, alerts, dependencies, snapshots, and configuration objects - giving AI assistants full coverage across applications, services, and infrastructure layers.

• Flexible and powerful filtering for precise queries: Tools support advanced filtering options such as time ranges, tags, service names, application IDs, metric thresholds, and entity-specific identifiers, allowing AI agents to retrieve highly targeted datasets (e.g.,Show me endpoints with latency > 500ms in the last hour? or Show me hosts tagged production running on EC2?).

• Built for IDEs and developer CLIs: The Instana MCP Server integrates seamlessly with agentic IDEs and developer command-line assistants, enabling tools like AI coding copilots, chat-based IDE extensions, and intelligent CLIs to access observability data from Instana through natural-language queries - making metrics, traces, alerts, and infrastructure insights available directly where developers write and debug code.