Which protocol does an agent use to send the data to the backend?

IBM Instana agents use HTTPS, the industry standard secure protocol, to transmit telemetry data to Instana’s backend servers or clusters. Instana documentation says: "All agent-to-backend traffic is encrypted and transmitted via HTTPS, meeting data confidentiality and compliance requirements." The use of HTTPS prevents unauthorized data interception by using strong TLS encryption on every packet exchanged between agent and backend, regardless of whether the deployment is on-premises or SaaS. FTP, SSH, and NFS are protocols for file transfer, system access, or storage mounting but are never used for telemetry transmission in Instana's architecture. Secure HTTP is essential for privacy by design, is policy-enforced, and supports audit-friendly observability in all supported Instana versions per IBM standards.