Advanced Elastic Agent configuration managed by Fleet

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Advanced Elastic Agent configuration managed by Fleet

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For basic Elastic Agent managed by Fleet scenarios follow the steps in Run Elastic Agent on Kubernetes managed by Fleet.

On managed Elastic Agent installations it can be useful to provide the ability to configure more advanced options, such as the configuration of providers during the startup. Refer to Providers for more details.

Following steps demonstrate above scenario:

Step 1: Download the Elastic Agent manifest

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It is advisable to follow the steps of Install Fleet-managed Elastic Agents with Kubernetes Integration installed in your policy and download the Elastic Agent manifest from Kibana UI

Notes: Sample manifests can also be found here

Step 2: Create a new configmap

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Create a new configmap.

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: agent-node-datastreams
  namespace: kube-system
  labels:
    k8s-app: elastic-agent
data:
  agent.yml: |-
    providers.kubernetes_leaderelection.enabled: false
    fleet.enabled: true
    fleet.access_token: "<FLEET_ENROLLMENT_TOKEN>"
---

Notes

In the above example the disablement of kubernetes_leaderelection provider is demonstrated. Same procedure can be followed for alternative scenarios.

Example of configmap to configure kubernetes metadata enrichment.

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: agent-node-datastreams
  namespace: kube-system
  labels:
    k8s-app: elastic-agent
data:
  agent.yml: |-
    providers.kubernetes:
      add_resource_metadata:
        deployment: true
        cronjob: true
    fleet.enabled: true
    fleet.access_token: "<FLEET_ENROLLMENT_TOKEN>"
---

Find more information about Enrollment Tokens.

Step 3: Configure Daemonset

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Inside the downloaded manifest, update the Daemonset resource:

Update entrypoint.

containers:
  - name: elastic-agent
    image: docker.elastic.co/elastic-agent/elastic-agent: <ImageVersion>
    args: ["-c", "/etc/elastic-agent/agent.yml", "-e"]

Notes: The <ImageVersion> is just a placeholder for the elastic-agent image version that you will download in your manifest: eg. image: docker.elastic.co/elastic-agent/elastic-agent: 8.11.0 Important thing is to update your manifest with args details

Add extra Volume Mount.

volumeMounts:
  - name: datastreams
    mountPath: /etc/elastic-agent/agent.yml
    readOnly: true
    subPath: agent.yml

Add new Volume.

volumes:
  - name: datastreams
    configMap:
      defaultMode: 0640
      name: agent-node-datastreams

Important Notes

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By default the manifests for Elastic Agent managed by Fleet have hostNetwork:true. In order to support multiple installations of Elastic Agents in the same node you should set hostNetwork:false. See this relevant example as described in Elastic Agent Manifests in order to support Kube-State-Metrics Sharding.
The volume /usr/share/elastic-agent/state must remain mounted in elastic-agent-managed-kubernetes.yaml, otherwise custom config map provided above will be overwritten.

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