Free Practice Questions for IBM C1000-189 Exam

Instana’s contextual correlation engine combines different data types to build a unified observability model. IBM documentation states: "To correlate application performance with infrastructure metrics, Instana relies on logs, traces, tags, and time series metrics." Traces map the end-to-end request journey, metrics provide numerical measures of both system and app health, tags label resources for logical grouping and discovery, and logs offer deep diagnostic information. By analyzing traces and metrics together, Instana surfaces where latency, errors or bottlenecks in the application link directly to resource consumption or system events captured at the infrastructure level. Tags facilitate mapping services to containers, VMs, or Kubernetes objects. Raw counts (B, C) and raw transactional data (D) are part of the analysis pipeline but do not provide the required level of linkage for successful application-to-infrastructure mapping – only the union of traces, metrics, tags, and logs achieves this dimensionality.

Access to Instana's REST API is secured using authorization tokens—an industry-standard best practice for API authentication and traceability. IBM documentation says: "A personal or team API token is required to authenticate REST API calls."

Tokens serve as credentials embedded in HTTP headers on each request, providing both identity and access control for the API consumer. Tokens are mandatory; without a valid token, any API requests are denied with a 401 Unauthorized error, regardless of whether a tool (such as CURL) is used. Tokens can be scoped for individual users (personal tokens) or teams (team tokens), enabling granular tracking and revocation as part of enterprise security policies. API tokens are generated from the Instana UI under the profile or team section. Cookies and raw client libraries (e.g., Python) are not authentication methods for Instana APIs.

IBM Instana supports direct monitoring ofAWS Lambdavia serverless-specific agents that bridge trace, metric, and log data between Lambda executions and the Instana backend. The documentation specifies: "Instana's serverless agents enable tracing and monitoring of AWS Lambda functions—including cold start events, performance, and error metrics—correlating invocation traces with upstream and downstream services." Lambda is the only public cloud-native serverless runtime natively and fully integrated with Instana’s instrumentation and tracing. Azure Redis Cache, AWS Kinesis, and AWS SQS are data stores or message services, not supported for full serverless agent instrumentation (though they may be monitored via associated infrastructure and integration sensors). Instana’s Lambda agent is deployed as a Lambda layer or sidecar, delivering first-class observability for serverless architectures.

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 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.

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.

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.

IBM Instana Observability documentation makes it clear that, when integrating many IBM APM v8 agents with a single Instana Agent host, it is highly recommended to increase the JVM memory allocation of the Instana host agent. The official guidance is: "If integrating several hundred APM v8 agents with a single Instana host agent, make sure to increase the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) heap size on the Instana host agent, as the default settings may not suffice for the heightened metric ingestion and processing load." Without this adjustment, the host agent could experience memory pressure, leading to dropped metrics, agent restarts, or degraded ingestion. This step is essential for scaling and ensuring metric reliability in high-volume environments, as detailed in the agent performance tuning and scalability section of IBM’s documentation. Other options (A, B, D) do not address the resource requirements driven by metric collection at scale.

Based on IBM Instana documentation review, Incidents are the event type that triggers alerts when end users are impacted. The official IBM documentation states: "An incident helps you to understand situations impacting your edge services and critical infrastructure... Incidents are created as soon as Instana detects either a key performance indication (KPI) is breached on an edge service, or a critical infrastructure issue." However, the documentation also clarifies: "An issue is an event that is triggered if something out of the ordinary happens... An issue by itself does not trigger an alert, Instana simply notes that it happened. Should the service to where this system is connected behave badly, this issue is part of the incident." Critical issues can trigger alerts and may impact end users, but Incidents are specifically designed to represent situations where end-user-facing services (edge services) are impacted. The answer is B. Incident as the primary event type for end-user impact alerts.