Elastic Agent: A quick overview
Let’s start with Elastic Agent and some of the additional terminology that comes with it.
Elastic Agent provides a unified way to enable host monitoring of various data types such as logs, metrics, and other data. Additionally, it offers protection from security threats, operating system data querying, remote service or hardware data forwarding, and more. Agent streamlines and accelerates monitoring deployments across your infrastructure. Each agent is associated with policies that can be updated to incorporate integrations for new data sources, security measures, and additional functionalities.
Elastic Integrations are designed to enable you to quickly and easily collect data from external sources to gain insight. These integrations often use pre-built settings, dashboards, visualizations, and pipelines to help make sense of metrics, logs, and events. The Integrations page can be found in your local Kibana instance, making it easy to browse, install, and configure integrations in conjunction with Elastic Agent and their policies. You can also see a list of available integrations on the Elastic website.
Policies are collections of settings and integrations that define how an Elastic Agent will function. Multiple integrations can be assigned to an Agent Policy allowing flexibility in what data agents are able to capture. Assigning an Elastic Agent Policy to multiple agents allows you to manage and configure many agents at a greater scale with the use of Fleet.
Fleet is the user interface within Kibana that allows for centralized management of the Elastic Agents and associated policies. This user interface gives you the ability to see the health of each Agent, the installed version, the last check-in or activity time, and policy information. The communication to each of the Elastic Agents is facilitated by Fleet via Fleet Server. This allows for remotely pushing out new policy updates upon check-in as well as upgrading the Agent binaries or integrations.
Fleet Server is an instance of Elastic Agent that is running as the coordinator of communication between Fleet and all the deployed Elastic Agents.
*whew*
Check out Elastic’s documentation to read more about all of these topics relating to Agent and Fleet.
We’ll be integrating Elastic Agent and Fleet to provide a demonstration of how logs and metrics can be collected along with managing policies. Let’s add it to our architecture diagram to see how this will look.
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