Configure feature flags for standalone Elastic Agents

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Configure feature flags for standalone Elastic Agents

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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.

The Feature Flags section of the elastic-agent.yml config file contains settings in Elastic Agent that are disabled by default. These may include experimental features, changes to behaviors within Elastic Agent or its components, or settings that could cause a breaking change. For example a setting that changes information included in events might be inconsistent with the naming pattern expected in your configured Elastic Agent output.

To enable any of the settings listed on this page, change the associated enabled flag from false to true.

agent.features:
  mysetting:
    enabled: true

Feature flag configuration settings

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You can specify the following settings in the Feature Flag section of the elastic-agent.yml config file.

Fully qualified domain name (FQDN)

When enabled, information provided about the current host through the host.name key, in events produced by Elastic Agent, is in FQDN format (somehost.example.com rather than somehost). This helps you to distinguish between hosts on different domains that have similar names. With fqdn enabled, the fully qualified hostname allows each host to be more easily identified when viewed in Kibana.

This functionality is in technical preview and may be changed or removed in a future release. Elastic will work to fix any issues, but features in technical preview are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features.

FQDN reporting is not currently supported in APM.

For FQDN reporting to work as expected, the hostname of the current host must either:

  • Have a CNAME entry defined in DNS.
  • Have one of its corresponding IP addresses respond successfully to a reverse DNS lookup.

If neither pre-requisite is satisfied, host.name continues to report the hostname of the current host as if the FQDN feature flag were not enabled.

To enable fully qualified domain names set enabled: true for the fqdn setting:

agent.features:
  fqdn:
    enabled: true