Install Elastic Agents

You have a few options for installing and managing an Elastic Agent:

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. During upgrades, double the disk space is required to store the new Elastic Agent binary. After the upgrade completes, the original Elastic Agent is removed from disk to free up the space.

Adding integrations will increase the memory used by the agent and its processes.

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
      }
    }
  }
}