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Quickstart for hosts / VMs on Elastic Cloud Serverless

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 on hosts and VMs with Elastic Cloud Serverless to collect host metrics, logs, and application traces. Send the data through OTLP to your Elastic Serverless project.

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 with Elastic Cloud Serverless.

  1. Download the Elastic Agent

    Download the Elastic Agent for your operating system.

  2. Configure the Elastic Agent

    Follow these steps to retrieve the managed OTLP endpoint URL for your Serverless project:

    1. In Elastic Cloud Serverless, open your Observability project.
    2. Go to Add data → Application → OpenTelemetry.
    3. Select Managed OTLP Endpoint in the second step.
    4. Copy the OTLP endpoint configuration value.
    5. Select Create API Key to generate an API key.

    Replace <ELASTIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT> and <ELASTIC_API_KEY> before applying the following command.

    Shell 
    ELASTIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT=<ELASTIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT> && \
ELASTIC_API_KEY=<ELASTIC_API_KEY> && \
cp ./otel_samples/managed_otlp/logs_metrics_traces.yml ./otel.yml && \
mkdir -p ./data/otelcol && \
sed -i "s#\${env:STORAGE_DIR}#${PWD}/data/otelcol#g" ./otel.yml && \
sed -i "s#\${env:ELASTIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT}#${ELASTIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT}#g" ./otel.yml && \
sed -i "s#\${env:ELASTIC_API_KEY}#${ELASTIC_API_KEY}#g" ./otel.yml
    Shell 
    ELASTIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT=<ELASTIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT> && \
ELASTIC_API_KEY=<ELASTIC_API_KEY> && \
cp ./otel_samples/managed_otlp/logs_metrics_traces.yml ./otel.yml && \
mkdir -p ./data/otelcol && \
sed -i '' "s#\${env:STORAGE_DIR}#${PWD}/data/otelcol#g" ./otel.yml && \
sed -i '' "s#\${env:ELASTIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT}#${ELASTIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT}#g" ./otel.yml && \
sed -i '' "s#\${env:ELASTIC_API_KEY}#${ELASTIC_API_KEY}#g" ./otel.yml
    Powershell 
    Remove-Item -Path .\otel.yml -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
Copy-Item .\otel_samples\managed_otlp\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_OTLP_ENDPOINT}', "<ELASTIC_OTLP_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.

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

    The Collector opens ports 4317 and 4318 to receive application data from locally running OTel SDKs without authentication. This allows the SDKs to send data without any further configuration needed as they use this endpoint by default.

  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).

  5. Explore your data

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

The following issues might occur.

The following error is due to an improperly formatted API key:

Txt 
Exporting failed. Dropping data.
{"kind": "exporter", "data_type": }
"Unauthenticated desc = ApiKey prefix not found"

Format your API key as "Authorization": "ApiKey <api-key-value-here>" or "Authorization=ApiKey <api-key>" depending on whether you're using a Collector or SDK.

The managed endpoint has per-project rate limits in place. If you reach this limit, contact our support team.