Observe Agent
Learn about the Observe Agent.
What is the Observe Agent?
The Observe Agent runs on your hosts and in your architecture to collect logs, metrics, traces, and events and sends them to Observe. The Observe Agent is built on the OpenTelemetry (OTel) collector.
Open port 8888 for HTTP connections from localhost to the Observe Agent. This port is used by the Observe Agent to monitor itself and the status command won't work if port 8888 is blocked.
When should I use the Observe Agent?
The Observe Agent is useful in the following scenarios:
- You want an easy, no-hassle path to get system logs and metrics into Observe.
- You don’t want to manage separate tools like Fluent Bit or OpenTelemetry manually.
- You’re running on bare metal, VMs, or Kubernetes and want consistent observability.
Where do I get the Observe Agent?
The latest Observe Agent is available on GitHub.
You can use the Helm chart to install the Observe Agent in a Kubernetes environment. The latest version of the Helm chart is also available on GitHub.
Where can I install the Observe Agent?
The Observe Agent supports x86_64 and arm64 architectures and can be installed on local devices, containerized environments, and on-premises data centers.
Prerequisites
Before you install the Observe Agent, open port 8888 for HTTP connections from localhost to the Observe Agent. This port is used by the Observe Agent to monitor itself and the status command won't work if port 8888 is blocked.
Local devices
You can install the Observe Agent on the following types of local devices:
Platform | Details |
|---|---|
Debian Linux | Debian 11+ Ubuntu (24.04 LTS, 22.04 LTS, 20.04 LTS, 18.04 LTS, 16.04 LTS) |
Red Hat Linux | Amazon Linux 2 Amazon Linux 2023 CentOS 7+ Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8+ |
macOS | macOS Sonoma 14+ |
Windows | Windows Server 2016+ Windows 10 |
See Install on a host.
Kubernetes environments
You can install the Observe Agent in Kubernetes environments. See Install on Kubernetes.
Amazon ECS environments
You can install the Observe Agent on Amazon ECS (EC2) and Amazon ECS (Fargate) compute options. See Install on Amazon ECS.
Ansible
You can install the Observe Agent on Ansible for Linux and Windows. See Install on Ansible.
Docker environments
You can install the Observe Agent as a Docker image in your Docker environments. See Install Docker image.
How much space does the Observe Agent take up?
The total disk footprint of the Observe Agent is usually between 100–600 MB, depending on data volume and buffering:
| Component | Approximate size |
|---|---|
| Binary (the Observe Agent) | Approximately 50–70 MB |
| Configuration files and logs | Approximately 1-10 MB |
| Buffering/data | Varies, the default maximum is 500 MB. You can tune this limit using the buffers.max_disk_bytes parameter in the /etc/observe-agent/vector.yaml configuration file. |
Observe Agent CPU usage
The amount of CPU used by the Observe Agent depends on the volume of data, types of sources, and amount of parsing and filtering (data processing) you configure.
| Environment | Typical CPU usage |
|---|---|
| Idle or low load, such as a dev or test host | less than 1% of a single core |
| Moderate log volume, such as a small production node | Approximately 1–5% of a core |
| High throughput systems, such as 5,000 or more events per second | Approximately 5–15% of a core or more |
| Kubernetes (DaemonSet) | Approximately 10–100 millicores (0.1 of a core) per node |
What data does the Observe Agent collect?
The Observe Agent collects the following types of data:
| Data type | Example sources |
|---|---|
| Logs | System logs, application logs, Docker logs, Kubernetes logs |
| Metrics | CPU statistics, memory usage, disk usage, host and container network logs |
| Traces | (When configured with OpenTelemetry or OTLP source) |
| Custom events | Local files or directories |
Updated 9 days ago