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Quickstart for hosts / VMs on self-managed deployments

Serverless Observability

Elastic Cloud Serverless projects are autoscaled environments, fully managed by Elastic and available on Elastic Cloud.

Availability

  • Generally available

    This functionality is generally available and ready for production usage.

Stack

The Elastic Stack includes Elastic's core products such as Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, and Beats.

Availability

  • Generally available

    This functionality is generally available and ready for production usage.

Unless stated otherwise on the page, this functionality is available when your Elastic Stack is deployed on Elastic Cloud Hosted, Elastic Cloud Enterprise, Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes, and self-managed environments.

This documentation corresponds to the latest patch available for each minor version. If you're not using the latest patch, check the release notes for changes.

Elastic Agent

Elastic Agent can run in OpenTelemetry mode to retrieve traces, metrics, and logs from your infrastructure and applications, and forward them to Elastic Observability.

Availability

  • Generally available

    This functionality is generally available and ready for production usage.

This documentation corresponds to the latest patch available for each minor version. If you're not using the latest patch, check the release notes for changes.

Learn how to set up the Elastic Agent and EDOT SDKs to collect host metrics, logs and application traces.

The fastest way to get started is the Add data screen in Elastic Observability. It generates install commands with your endpoint and API key already included.

  1. Open Elastic Observability.
  2. Go to Add data.
  3. Select what you want to monitor.
  4. Follow the instructions.

Follow these steps to deploy the Elastic Agent and EDOT SDKs.

  1. Download the Elastic Agent

    Download the Elastic Agent for your operating system, extract the archive and move to the extracted directory.

  2. Configure the Elastic Agent

    Retrieve your Elasticsearch endpoint and API key and replace <ELASTICSEARCH_ENDPOINT> and <ELASTIC_API_KEY> before applying the following command.

    Shell 
    ELASTICSEARCH_ENDPOINT=<ELASTICSEARCH_ENDPOINT> && \
ELASTIC_API_KEY=<ELASTIC_API_KEY> && \
cp ./otel_samples/logs_metrics_traces.yml ./otel.yml && \
mkdir -p ./data/otelcol && \
sed -i "s#\${env:STORAGE_DIR}#${PWD}/data/otelcol#g" ./otel.yml && \
sed -i "s#\${env:ELASTIC_ENDPOINT}#${ELASTICSEARCH_ENDPOINT}#g" ./otel.yml && \
sed -i "s#\${env:ELASTIC_API_KEY}#${ELASTIC_API_KEY}#g" ./otel.yml
    Shell 
    ELASTICSEARCH_ENDPOINT=<ELASTICSEARCH_ENDPOINT> && \
ELASTIC_API_KEY=<ELASTIC_API_KEY> && \
cp ./otel_samples/logs_metrics_traces.yml ./otel.yml && \
mkdir -p ./data/otelcol && \
sed -i '' "s#\${env:STORAGE_DIR}#${PWD}/data/otelcol#g" ./otel.yml && \
sed -i '' "s#\${env:ELASTIC_ENDPOINT}#${ELASTICSEARCH_ENDPOINT}#g" ./otel.yml && \
sed -i '' "s#\${env:ELASTIC_API_KEY}#${ELASTIC_API_KEY}#g" ./otel.yml
    Powershell 
    Remove-Item -Path .\otel.yml -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
Copy-Item .\otel_samples\logs_metrics_traces.yml .\otel.yml
New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force -Path .\data\otelcol | Out-Null

$content = Get-Content .\otel.yml
$content = $content -replace '\${env:STORAGE_DIR}', "$PWD\data\otelcol"
$content = $content -replace '\${env:ELASTIC_ENDPOINT}', "<ELASTICSEARCH_ENDPOINT>"
$content = $content -replace '\${env:ELASTIC_API_KEY}', "<ELASTIC_API_KEY>"
$content | Set-Content .\otel.yml

  3. Run the Elastic Agent

    Run the following command to run the Elastic Agent.

    Note

    The Collector will open the ports 4317 and 4318 to receive application data from locally running OTel SDKs.

    Shell 
    sudo ./otelcol --config otel.yml
    Powershell 
    .\elastic-agent.exe otel --config otel.yml

  4. (Optional) Instrument your applications

    To collect telemetry from applications and use the Elastic Agent as a gateway, instrument your target applications following the setup instructions:

    Configure your SDKs to send the data to the local Elastic Agent using OTLP/gRPC (http://localhost:4317) or OTLP/HTTP (http://localhost:4318).

    Tip

    Activate Central Configuration to configure your EDOT SDKs from within Kibana. Refer to EDOT SDKs Central Configuration.

  5. Install the content pack

    Install the System OpenTelemetry Assets integration in Kibana.

  6. Explore your data

    Go to Kibana and select Dashboards to explore your newly collected data.

Having issues with Elastic OpenTelemetry? Refer to the Troubleshooting common issues with the Elastic Agent and Troubleshooting the EDOT SDKs for help.