Install Elastic Agentsedit
You can install only a single Elastic Agent per host. Due to the fact that the Elastic Agent may read data sources that are only accessible by a superuser, Elastic Agent will therefore also need to be executed with superuser permissions.
You might need to log in as a root user (or Administrator on Windows) to
run the commands described here. After the Elastic Agent service is installed and running,
make sure you run these commands without prepending them with ./ to avoid
invoking the wrong binary.
You have a few options for installing and managing an Elastic Agent:
-
Install a Fleet-managed Elastic Agent (recommended)
With this approach, you install Elastic Agent and use Fleet in Kibana to define, configure, and manage your agents in a central location.
We recommend using Fleet management because it makes the management and upgrade of your agents considerably easier.
Refer to Install Fleet-managed Elastic Agents.
-
Install Elastic Agent in standalone mode (advanced users)
With this approach, you install Elastic Agent and manually configure the agent locally on the system where it’s installed. You are responsible for managing and upgrading the agents. This approach is reserved for advanced users only.
Refer to Install standalone Elastic Agents (advanced users).
-
Install Elastic Agent in a containerized environment
You can run Elastic Agent inside of a container — either with Fleet Server or standalone. Docker images for all versions of Elastic Agent are available from the Elastic Docker registry, and we provide deployment manifests for running on Kubernetes.
Refer to:
Minimum Requirementsedit
Minimum requirements have been determined by running the Elastic Agent on a GCP e2-micro instance (2vCPU/1GB).
The Elastic Agent used the default policy, running the system integration and self-monitoring.
CPU |
Under 2% total, including all monitoring processes |
Disk |
1.7 GB |
RSS Mem Size |
400 MB |
Adding integrations will increase the memory used by the agent and its processes.
Limiting CPU usageedit
If you need to limit the amount of CPU consumption you can use the agent.limits.go_max_procs configuration option. This parameter limits the number of operating system threads that can be executing Go code simultaneously in each Go process. The agent.limits.go_max_procs option accepts an integer value not less than 0, which is the default value that stands for "all available CPUs".
The agent.limits.go_max_procs limit applies independently to the agent and each underlying Go process that it supervises. For example, if Elastic Agent is configured to supervise two Beats with agent.limits.go_max_procs: 2 in the policy, then the total CPU limit is six, where each of the three processes (one Elastic Agent and two Beats) may execute independently on two CPUs.
This setting is similar to the Beats max_procs setting. For more detail, refer to the GOMAXPROCS function in the Go runtime documentation.
To enable agent.limits.go_max_procs, run a Fleet API request from the Kibana Dev Tools console to override your current Elastic Agent policy and add the go_max_procs parameter. For example, to limit Go processes supervised by Elastic Agent to two operating system threads each, run:
PUT kbn:/api/fleet/agent_policies/<policy-id>
{
"name": "<policy-name>",
"namespace": "default",
"overrides": {
"agent": {
"limits": {
"go_max_procs": 2
}
}
}
}