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Elastic Docs ›Fleet and Elastic Agent Guide [master] ›Install Elastic Agents

Run Elastic Agent without administrative privileges

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Run Elastic Agent without administrative privileges

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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.

Beginning with Elastic Stack version 8.15, Elastic Agent is no longer required to be run by a user with superuser privileges. You can now run agents in an unprivileged mode that does not require root access on Linux or macOS, or admin access on Windows. Being able to run agents without full administrative privileges is often a requirement in organizations where this kind of access is often very limited.

In general, agents running without full administrative privileges will perform and behave exactly as those run by a superuser. There are certain integrations and datastreams that are not available, however. If an integration requires root access, this is indicated on the integration main page.

You can also change the privilege mode of an Elastic Agent after it has been installed.

Refer to Agent and dashboard behaviors in unprivileged mode and Run Elastic Agent in unprivileged mode for the requirements and steps associated with running an agent without full root or admin superuser privileges.

Run Elastic Agent in unprivileged mode

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To run Elastic Agent without administrative privileges you use exactly the same commands that you use for Elastic Agent otherwise, with one exception. When you run the elastic-agent install command, add the --unprivileged flag. For example:

elastic-agent install \
  --url=https://cedd4e0e21e240b4s2bbbebdf1d6d52f.fleet.eu-west-1.aws.cld.elstc.co:443 \
  --enrollment-token=NEFmVllaa0JLRXhKebVKVTR5TTI6N2JaVlJpSGpScmV0ZUVnZVlRUExFQQ== \
  --unprivileged

Note the following current restrictions for running Elastic Agent in unprivileged mode:

  • On Linux systems, after Elastic Agent has been installed with the --unprivileged flag, all Elastic Agent commands can be run without being the root user.

    • The sudo option is still required for the elastic-agent install command. Only root can install new services. The installed service will not run as the root user.
  • Using sudo without specifying an alternate non-root user with sudo -u in a command may result in an error due to the agent not having the required privileges.
  • Using sudo -u elastic-agent-user will run commands as the user running the Elastic Agent service and will always work.

  • For files that allow users in the elastic-agent group access, using an alternate user that has been added to that group will also work. There are still some commands that are only accessible to the elastic-agent-user that runs the service.

    • For example, elastic-agent inspect requires you to prefix the command with sudo -u elastic-agent-user.

      sudo -u elastic-agent-user elastic-agent inspect

Agent and dashboard behaviors in unprivileged mode

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In addition to the integrations that are not available when Elastic Agent is run in unpriviledged mode, certain data streams are also not available. The following tables show, for different operating systems, the impact when the agent does not have full administrative privileges. In most cases the limitations can be mediated by granting permissions for a user or group to the files indicated.

Table 1. macOS

Action Behavior in unprivileged mode Resolution

Run Elastic Agent with the System integration

Log file error: Unexpected file opening error: Failed opening /var/log/system.log: open /var/log/system.log: permission denied.

Give read permission to the elastic-agent group for the /var/log/system.log file to fix this error.

Run Elastic Agent with the System integration

On the [Logs System] Syslog dashboard, the Syslog events by hostname, Syslog hostnames and processes and Syslog logs visualizations are are missing data.

Give read permission to the elastic-agent group for the /var/log/system.log file to fix the missing visualizations.

Run Elastic Agent with the System integration

On the [Metrics System] Host overview dashboard, only the processes run by the elastic-agent-user user are shown in the CPU and memory usage lists.

To fix the missing processes in the visualization lists you can add add the elastic-agent-user user to the system admin group. Note that while this mitigates the issue, it also grants elastic-agent user with more permissions than may be desired.

Run Elastic Agent and access the Elastic Agent dashboards

On the [Elastic Agent] Agents info dashboard, visualizations including Most Active Agents and Integrations per Agent are missing data.

To fix the missing data in the visualizations you can add add the elastic-agent-user user to the system admin group. Note that while this mitigates the issue it also grants elastic-agent user with more permissions than may be desired.

Run Elastic Agent and access the Elastic Agent dashboards

On the [Elastic Agent] Integrations dashboard, visualizations including Integration Errors Table, Events per integration and Integration Errors are missing data.

To fix the missing data in the visualizations you can add add the elastic-agent-user user to the system admin group. Note that while this mitigates the issue it also grants elastic-agent user with more permissions than may be desired.

Table 2. Linux

Action Behavior in unprivileged mode Resolution

Run Elastic Agent with the System integration

Log file error: [elastic_agent.filebeat][error] Harvester could not be started on new file: /var/log/auth.log.1, Err: error setting up harvester: Harvester setup failed. Unexpected file opening error: Failed opening /var/log/auth.log.1: open /var/log/auth.log.1: permission denied

To avoid the error you can add add the elastic-agent-user user to the adm group. Note that while this mitigates the issue it also grants elastic-agent user with more permissions than may be desired.

Run Elastic Agent with the System integration

Log file error: [elastic_agent.metricbeat][error] error getting filesystem usage for /run/user/1000/gvfs: error in Statfs syscall: permission denied

To avoid the error you can add add the elastic-agent-user user to the adm group. Note that while this mitigates the issue it also grants elastic-agent user with more permissions than may be desired.

Run Elastic Agent with the System integration

On the [Logs System] Syslog dashboard, the Syslog events by hostname, Syslog hostnames and processes and Syslog logs visualizations are are missing data.

To fix the missing data in the visualizations you can add add the elastic-agent-user user to the adm group. Note that while this mitigates the issue it also grants elastic-agent user with more permissions than may be desired.

Run Elastic Agent and access the Elastic Agent dashboards

On the [Elastic Agent] Agents info dashboard, visualizations including Most Active Agents and Integrations per Agent are missing data.

Giving read permission to the elastic-agent group for the /var/log/system.log file will partially fix the visualizations, but errors may still occur because the elastic-agent-user does not have read access to files in the /run/user/1000/ directory.

Run Elastic Agent and access the Elastic Agent dashboards

On the [Elastic Agent] Integrations dashboard, visualizations including Integration Errors Table, Events per integration and Integration Errors are missing data.

Give read permission to the elastic-agent group for the /var/log/system.log file to fix the missing visualizations.

Table 3. Windows

Action Behavior in unprivileged mode Resolution

Run Elastic Agent with the System integration

Log file error: failed to open Windows Event Log channel "Security": Access is denied

Add the elastic-agent-user user to the Event Log Users group to fix this error.

Run Elastic Agent with the System integration

Log file error: cannot open new key in the registry in order to enable the performance counters: Access is denied

Update the permissions for the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\PartMgr registry to fix this error.

Run Elastic Agent with the System integration

Most of the System and Elastic Agent dashboard visualizations are missing all data.

Add the elastic-agent-user user to the Event Log Users group and update the permissions for the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\PartMgr registry to fix the missing visualizations.

Note that the elastic-agent-user user may still not have access to all processes, so the lists in the Top processes by CPU usage and Top processes by memory usage visualizations may be incomplete.

Run Elastic Agent with the System integration

On the [Metrics System] Host overview dashboard, the Disk usage visualizations are missing data.

This occurs because direct access to the disk or a volume is restricted and not available to users without administrative privileges. Refer to Running with Special Privileges in the Microsoft documentation for details.

Using Elastic integrations

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Most Elastic integrations support running Elastic Agent in unprivileged mode. For the exceptions, any integration that requires Elastic Agent to have root privileges has the requirement indicated at the top of the integration page in Kibana:

Elastic Defend integration page showing root requirement

As well, a warning is displayed in Kibana if you try to add an integration that requires root privileges to an Elastic Agent policy that has agents enrolled in unprivileged mode.

Warning indicating that root privileged agent is required for an integration

Examples of integrations that require Elastic Agent to have administrative privileges are:

Viewing an Elastic Agent privilege mode

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The Agent details page shows you the privilege mode for any running Elastic Agent.

To view the status of an Elastic Agent:

  1. In Fleet, open the Agents tab.
  2. Select an agent and click View agent in the actions menu.

  3. The Agent details tab shows whether the agent is running in privileged or unprivileged mode.

    Agent details tab showing the agent is running as non-root

As well, for any Elastic Agent policy you can view the number of agents that are currently running in privileged or unprivileged mode:

  1. In Fleet, open the Agent policies tab.
  2. Click the agent policy to view the policy details.

The number of agents enrolled with the policy is shown. Hover over the link to view the number of privileged and unpriviled agents.

Agent policy tab showing 1 unprivileged agent and 0 privileged enrolled agents

In the event that the Elastic Agent policy has integrations installed that require root privileges, but there are agents running without root privileges, this is shown in the tooltip.

Agent policy tab showing 1 unprivileged agent and 0 privileged enrolled agents

Changing an Elastic Agent’s privilege mode

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For any installed Elastic Agent you can change the mode that it’s running in by running the privileged or unprivileged subcommand.

Change mode from privileged to unprivileged:

sudo elastic-agent unprivileged

Note that changing to unprivileged mode is prevented if the agent is currently enrolled in a policy that includes an integration that requires administrative access, such as the Elastic Defend integration.

Change mode from unprivileged to privileged:

sudo elastic-agent privileged

When an agent is running in unprivileged mode, if it doesn’t have the right level of privilege to read a data source, you can also adjust the agent’s privileges by adding elastic-agent-user to the user group that has privileges to read the data source.

As background, when you run Elastic Agent in unprivileged mode, one user and one group are created on the host. The same names are used for all operating systems:

  • elastic-agent-user: The user that is created and that the Elastic Agent service runs as.
  • elastic-agent: The group that is created. Any user in this group has access to control and communicate over the control protocol to the Elastic Agent daemon.

For example:

  1. When you install Elastic Agent with the --unprivileged setting, the elastic-agent-user user and the elastic-agent group are created automatically.
  2. If you then want your user myuser to be able to run an Elastic Agent command such as elastic-agent status, add the myuser user to the elastic-agent group.
  3. Then, once added to the group, the elastic-agent status command will work. Prior to that, the user myuser running the command will result in a permission error that indicates a problem communicating with the control socket.
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