« Install Elastic Agents Install standalone Elastic Agents »
Elastic Docs ›Fleet and Elastic Agent Guide [8.15] ›Install Elastic Agents

Install Fleet-managed Elastic Agents

edit

Install Fleet-managed Elastic Agents

edit

Fleet is a web-based UI in Kibana for centrally managing Elastic Agents. To use Fleet, you install Elastic Agent, then enroll the agent in a policy defined in Kibana. The policy includes integrations that specify how to collect observability data from specific services and protect endpoints. The Elastic Agent connects to a trusted Fleet Server instance to retrieve the policy and report agent events.

Where to start

edit

To get up and running quickly, read one of our end-to-end guides:

Looking for upgrade info? Refer to Upgrade Elastic Agents.

Just want to learn how to install Elastic Agent? Continue reading this page.

Prerequisites

edit

You will always need:

  • A Kibana user with All privileges on Fleet and Integrations. Since many Integrations assets are shared across spaces, users need the Kibana privileges in all spaces.
  • Fleet Server running in a location accessible to Elastic Agent. Elastic Agent must have a direct network connection to Fleet Server and Elasticsearch. If you’re using our hosted Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud, Fleet Server is already available as part of the Integrations Server. For self-managed deployments, refer to Deploy on-premises and self-managed.
  • Internet connection for Kibana to download integration packages from the Elastic Package Registry. Make sure the Kibana server can connect to https://epr.elastic.co on port 443. If your environment has network traffic restrictions, there are ways to work around this requirement. See Air-gapped environments for more information.

If you are using a Fleet Server that uses your organization’s certificate, you will also need:

  • A Certificate Authority (CA) certificate to configure Transport Layer Security (TLS) to encrypt traffic. If your organization already uses the Elastic Stack, you may already have a CA certificate. If you do not have a CA certificate, you can read more about generating one in Configure SSL/TLS for self-managed Fleet Servers.

If you’re running Elastic Agent 7.9 or earlier, stop the agent and manually remove it from your host.

Installation steps

edit

You can install only a single Elastic Agent per host.

Elastic Agent can monitor the host where it’s deployed, and it can collect and forward data from remote services and hardware where direct deployment is not possible.

To install an Elastic Agent and enroll it in Fleet:

  1. In Fleet, open the Agents tab and click Add agent.

  2. In the Add agent flyout, select an existing agent policy or create a new one. If you create a new policy, Fleet generates a new Fleet enrollment token.

    For on-premises deployments, you can dedicate a policy to all the agents in the network boundary and configure that policy to include a specific Fleet Server (or a cluster of Fleet Servers).

    Read more in Add a Fleet Server to a policy.

  3. Make sure Enroll in Fleet is selected.

  4. Download, install, and enroll the Elastic Agent on your host by selecting your host operating system and following the Install Elastic Agent on your host step. Note that the commands shown are for AMD platforms, but ARM packages are also available. Refer to the Elastic Agent downloads page for the full list of available packages.

    1. If you are enrolling the agent in a Fleet Server that uses your organization’s certificate you must add the --certificate-authorities option to the command provided in the in-product instructions. If you do not include the certificate, you will see the following error: "x509: certificate signed by unknown authority".

      Add agent flyout in Kibana

After about a minute, the agent will enroll in Fleet, download the configuration specified in the agent policy, and start collecting data.

Notes:

  • If you encounter an "x509: certificate signed by unknown authority" error, you might be trying to enroll in a Fleet Server that uses self-signed certs. To fix this problem in a non-production environment, pass the --insecure flag. For more information, refer to the troubleshooting guide.
  • Optionally, you can use the --tag flag to specify a comma-separated list of tags to apply to the enrolled Elastic Agent. For more information, refer to Filter list of Agents by tags.
  • Refer to Installation layout for the location of installed Elastic Agent files.
  • Because Elastic Agent is installed as an auto-starting service, it will restart automatically if the system is rebooted.

To confirm that Elastic Agent is installed and running, open the Agents tab in Fleet.

Fleet showing enrolled agents

If the status hangs at Enrolling, make sure the elastic-agent process is running.

If you run into problems:

For information about managing Elastic Agent in Fleet, refer to Centrally manage Elastic Agents in Fleet.

« Install Elastic Agents Install standalone Elastic Agents »