Elastic Agent standalone configurationedit

Running Elastic Agent in standalone mode is an advanced use case. The documentation is incomplete and not yet mature. When possible, we recommend using Fleet-managed agents instead of standalone mode.

To get started quickly, use Kibana to create and download a standalone policy file. You’ll still need to deploy and manage the file, though. For more information, refer to Create a standalone Elastic Agent policy.

Standalone Elastic Agents are manually configured and managed locally on the systems where they are installed. They are useful when you are not interested in centrally managing agents in Fleet, either due to your company’s security requirements, or because you prefer to use another configuration management system.

To configure standalone Elastic Agents, specify settings in the elastic-agent.yml policy file deployed with the agent. Prior to installation, the file is located in the extracted Elastic Agent package. After installation, the file is copied to the directory described in Installation layout. To apply changes after installation, you must modify the installed file.

For installation details, refer to Install standalone Elastic Agents (advanced users).

The following sections describe some settings you might need to configure to run an Elastic Agent standalone. For a full reference example, refer to the elastic-agent.reference.yml file.

The settings described here are available for standalone Elastic Agents. Settings for Fleet-managed agents are specified through the UI. You do not set them explicitly in a policy file.