Fleet and Elastic Agent 8.4.0

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Review important information about the Fleet and Elastic Agent 8.4.0 release.

Breaking changes

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Breaking changes can prevent your application from optimal operation and performance. Before you upgrade, review the breaking changes, then mitigate the impact to your application.

xpack.agents.* are uneditable in UI when defined in kibana.yml

Details
When you configure setxpack.fleet.agents.fleet_server.hosts and xpack.fleet.agents.elasticsearch.hosts in kibana.yml, you are unable to update the fields on the Fleet UI. For more information, refer to #135669.

Impact
To configure setxpack.fleet.agents.fleet_server.hosts and xpack.fleet.agents.elasticsearch.hosts on the Fleet UI, avoid configuring the settings in kibana.yml.

Known issues

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Credentials error prevents Elastic Agent from ingesting AWS logs

Details

Elastic Agents configured to use the AWS integration may return an error similar to the following:

sqs ReceiveMessage failed: operation error SQS: ReceiveMessage, https response
error StatusCode: 403, RequestID: cb57783a-505f-5099-9160-23b8eea8ddbb,
api error SignatureDoesNotMatch: Credential should be scoped to a valid region.

This error was introduced by a breaking change in the AWS library.

Impact

Elastic Agent is unable to ingest AWS logs and some metrics. To resolve this error:

  • If you are using the default domain amazonaws.com, upgrade the AWS integration package to version 1.23.4 to apply the temporary fix added in PR #4103. If this does not solve your problem, set the AWS region (either from an environment variable, credentials or instance profile) where Elastic Agent is running.
  • Otherwise, wait to upgrade until the permanent fix added by PR #32921 is available in an upcoming stack release.

New features

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The 8.4.0 release adds the following new and notable features.

Fleet
  • Allow user to force install an unverified package #136108
  • Add tag rename and delete feature #135712
  • Add UI to bulk update agent tags #135646
  • Add API to bulk update agent tags #135520
  • Add UI to add and remove agent tags #135320
  • Support sorting agent list #135218
  • Promote Logstash output support to GA #135028
  • Create new API to manage download_source setting for agent binary downloads #134889
Elastic Agent
  • Add @metadata.input_id and @metadata.stream_id when applying the inject stream processor #527
  • Improve Elastic Agent status reporting: add a liveness endpoint, allow the fleet-gateway component to report degraded state, and add the status update time and messages to the status output #390 #569
  • Redact sensitive information collected by the elastic-agent diagnostics collect command #241 #566

Enhancements

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Fleet
  • Remove Kubernetes package granularity #136622
  • Align Elastic Agent manifests with the elastic-agent repo and add comments #136394
  • Configure source URI in global settings and in agent policy settings #136263
  • Add Kubernetes in platforms selection list and update managed agent installation steps #136109
  • Enable user to write custom ingest pipelines for Fleet-installed datastreams #134578
  • Update manifests for agent on Kubernetes with new permissions #133495
  • Add support for a textarea type in integrations #133070
Elastic Agent
There are no enhancements beyond the new features added in this release

Bug fixes

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Fleet
  • Use point in time for agent status query to provide accurate reporting #135816
Elastic Agent
  • Change default value of VerificationMode from empty string to full #184 #59
  • Add filemod times to contents of diagnostics collect command #570
  • Allow colon (:) characters in dynamic variables #624 #680
  • Allow dash (-) characters in variable names in EQL expressions #709 #710
  • Allow slash (/) characters in variable names in EQL and transpiler #715 #718
  • Fix problem with Elastic Agent incorrectly creating a Filebeat redis input when a policy contains a Packetbeat redis input #427 #700
  • Fix data duplication for standalone Elastic Agent on Kubernetes using the default manifest #31512 #742
  • Elastic Agent upgrades now clean up unneeded artifacts #693 #694 #752
  • Fix a panic caused by a race condition when installing the Elastic Agent #806 #823