elastic/elastic-agent

Elastic Agent is a unified agent that adds monitoring for logs, metrics, and other types of data to a host.

The tool solves the problem of managing multiple disparate monitoring agents across infrastructure by providing a single, centralized way to collect and forward observability data. It operates through a policy-driven architecture where configurations are managed centrally and deployed to hosts, with the agent responsible for collecting logs, metrics, and other data types according to those policies.

Organizations should adopt Elastic Agent when they want to consolidate monitoring across their infrastructure under a single agent rather than running separate tools for different data types. It suits environments where centralized policy management through Fleet is valuable, particularly for teams already using the Elastic Stack. The tool is designed to work with various integrations, though teams running Elastic Defend should be aware that this component requires the agent to be installed in the default path rather than custom locations.

Development on the project follows structured practices with mandatory changelog fragments for user-impacting changes, enforced through CI checks that can be bypassed only with explicit labeling. The team maintains a dedicated test framework that goes beyond standard Go tests to include cross-platform virtual machine testing for changes. Development installations are supported through a special mode that allows developers to run multiple agent instances on the same machine by isolating them in separate directories and automatically tagging them for identification in Fleet.