Install Elastic Agents
editInstall Elastic Agents
editYou 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).
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.
-
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:
- Run Elastic Agent in a container
- Run Elastic Agent Standalone on Kubernetes
- Run Elastic Agent on ECK — for Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes users
Minimum Requirements
editMinimum 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 |
1.7G |
RSS Mem Size |
400 MB |
Adding integrations will increase the memory used by the agent and its processes.