You don’t need deep “expert across multiple environments” experience for the exam, but having practical hands-on familiarity definitely matters. If you’re comfortable with the day-to-day Instana admin stuff such as installing agents, setting up alerts, and using the UI to follow traces when something looks off, you’ll be in good shape.
There are scenario-style questions, but they’re generally about what you would check or adjust first, not long case studies. If you’ve used Instana in a real environment, you’ll recognize the patterns. Doing a few IBM C1000-189 exam practice questions can help get used to the exam style.
If most of your experience is just from the training labs, I’d suggest spending some time in a live environment if you can especially looking at service dependencies and how Instana identifies issues. That part shows up more than memorizing where buttons are.
So overall basic setup knowledge is enough, as long as you’ve actually used Instana a bit and have seen real data and troubleshooting scenarios.