Configure monitoring for standalone Elastic Agents

Elastic Agent monitors Beats by default. To turn off or change monitoring settings, set options under agent.monitoring in the elastic-agent.yml file.

This example configures Elastic Agent monitoring:

agent.monitoring:
  # enabled turns on monitoring of running processes
  enabled: true
  # enables log monitoring
  logs: true
  # enables metrics monitoring
  metrics: true
  # exposes /debug/pprof/ endpoints for Elastic Agent and Beats
  # enable these endpoints if the monitoring endpoint is set to localhost
  pprof.enabled: false
  # specifies output to be used
  use_output: monitoring
  http:
    # exposes a /buffer endpoint that holds a history of recent metrics
    buffer.enabled: false

To turn off monitoring, set agent.monitoring.enabled to false. When set to false, Beats monitoring is turned off, and all other options in this section are ignored.

To enable monitoring, set agent.monitoring.enabled to true. Also set the logs and metrics settings to control whether logs, metrics, or both are collected. If neither setting is specified, monitoring is turned off. Set use_output to specify the output to which monitoring events are sent.

You can also add the setting agent.monitoring.http.enabled: true to expose a /liveness endpoint. By default, the endpoint returns a 200 OK status as long as Elastic Agent’s internal main loop is responsive and can process configuration changes. It can be configured to also monitor the component states and return an error if anything is degraded or has failed.

The agent.monitoring.pprof.enabled option controls whether the Elastic Agent and Beats expose the /debug/pprof/ endpoints with the monitoring endpoints. It is set to false by default. Data produced by these endpoints can be useful for debugging but present a security risk. It is recommended that this option remains false if the monitoring endpoint is accessible over a network.

The agent.monitoring.http.buffer.enabled option controls whether the Elastic Agent and Beats collect metrics into an in-memory buffer and expose these through a /buffer endpoint. It is set to false by default. This data can be useful for debugging or if the Elastic Agent has issues communicating with Elasticsearch. Enabling this option may slightly increase process memory usage.