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.

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