Hi everyone,

I've just submitted an official feature request on the IBM Ideas portal, and I'm curious if other platform engineers and DevOps teams are running into the same issue we are facing regarding Synthetic Tests and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC/Terraform).

If this sounds familiar, please upvote the idea here: <response-element class="" ng-version="0.0.0-PLACEHOLDER"></response-element>https://ideas.ibm.com/ideas/INSTANA-I-4960<response-element class="" ng-version="0.0.0-PLACEHOLDER"></response-element>

The Problem

When we onboard a new system, environment, or application team via Terraform, we want to provision everything in one single pass,including the Instana Synthetic Tests.

However, a system is rarely "live" or fully healthy the exact moment its infrastructure is created. Depending on the project, the gap between infrastructure creation and going live can range from:

• A few minutes (waiting for a container warm-up or deployment pipeline to finish).

• Several days or weeks (where development teams first need to perform manual configurations, data migrations, or compliance checks before going live).

Because Instana Synthetic Tests activate immediately upon creation, they instantly start failing and trigger false alarms in our incident management tools (like PagerDuty).

The Current Workarounds (and why they suck)

Right now, to prevent this alert fatigue, we either have to:

1. Manually go into the Instana UI to disable the newly created tests and remember to turn them back on weeks later (defeating the purpose of GitOps/IaC).

2. Build complex, brittle CI/CD workflows with external sleep timers to delay the creation of the monitoring resources.

The Proposed Solution: Activation Delay / Scheduled Start

We would love to see an optional activation offset or start-time parameter added to Synthetic Tests, with full support in the UI, API, and the Instana Terraform Provider.

How it should work:

• Flexible Input: Accept either a duration string (e.g., 15m, 2h, 7d) or a specific future timestamp.

• Pending State: Upon creation, the test enters a "Pending Activation" state. It does not execute and does not trigger alerts.

• Auto-Activate: Once the delay or date is reached, Instana automatically flips the test to active.

In Terraform, it could look as clean as this:

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resource "instana_synthetic_test" "team_onboarding" {
  label            = "New Team API Check"
  active           = true
  activation_delay = "7d" # Holds off testing/alerting for a week during manual config
}

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Who benefits?

• DevOps/Platform Teams: Write clean, single-pass IaC without ugly workarounds.

• On-Call & SRE Teams: Zero "deployment-noise" or false pages during long onboarding periods.

• Application Teams: A grace period to configure their stuff without bothering the ops team.

What do you think? Would this solve a headache in your automated deployments as well?

Please head over to the IBM Ideas portal and leave an upvote so we can get this on the product roadmap! 
Vote here: <response-element class="" ng-version="0.0.0-PLACEHOLDER"></response-element>IBM Ideas 

Thanks !