Grafana Agent is a telemetry collector for sending metrics, logs, and trace data to the opinionated Grafana observability stack. It works best with:
- Grafana Cloud
- Grafana Enterprise Stack
- OSS deployments of Grafana Loki, Prometheus, Grafana Mimir, and Grafana Tempo
Users of Prometheus operating at a massive scale (i.e., millions of active series) can struggle to run an unsharded singleton Prometheus instance: it becomes a single point of failure and requires a giant machine with a lot of resources allocated to it. Even with proper sharding across multiple Prometheus instances, using Prometheus to send data to a cloud vendor can seem redundant: why pay for cloud storage if data is already stored locally?
The Grafana Agent uses the same code as Prometheus, but tackles these issues by only using the most relevant parts of Prometheus for interaction with hosted metrics:
- Service Discovery
- Scraping
- Write Ahead Log (WAL)
- Remote Write
On top of these, the Grafana Agent enables easier sharding mechanisms that enable users to shard Agents across their cluster and lower the memory requirements per machine.
A typical deployment of the Grafana Agent for Prometheus metrics can see up to a 40% reduction in memory usage with equal scrape loads.
The Grafana Agent it can be used to send Prometheus metrics to any system that
supports the Prometheus remote_write API.
Trade-offs
By heavily optimizing Prometheus for remote write and resource reduction, some trade-offs have been made:
- You can't query the Agent; you can only query metrics from the remote write storage.
- Recording rules aren't supported.
- Alerts aren't supported.
- When sharding the Agent, if your node has problems that interrupt metric availability, metrics tracking that node won't be sent for alerting on.
While the Agent can't use recording rules and alerts, remote_write systems such
as Mimir currently support server-side rules and alerts. Note that this trade-off
means that reliability of alerts are tied to the reliability of the remote system
and alerts will be delayed at least by the time it takes for samples to reach
the remote system.
Getting started
When using Kubernetes this link offers the best guide.
Other installation methods can be found in our Grafana Agent documentation.
More detailed documentation is provided as part of the repository.
Example
The example/ folder contains docker-compose configs and a local
k3d/Tanka environment. Both examples deploy the Agent, Cortex and Grafana for
testing the agent. See the docker-compose README
and the k3d example README for more information.
Release schedule
Starting with the v0.28 release, a new minor release is planned for every 6
weeks. This includes a release for Grafana Agent, Grafana Agent Operator, and
the agentctl binary.
The release schedule is best-effort, and releases may be moved forward or backwards if needed. The planned release dates for future minor releases are not changed if one minor release is moved.
Patch and security releases may be created at any time.
Prometheus vendoring
The Grafana Agent vendors a downstream Prometheus repository maintained by Grafana Labs. This is done so experimental features Grafana Labs wants to contribute upstream can first be tested and iterated on quickly within the Agent. We aim to keep the experimental changes to a minimum and upstream changes as soon as possible.
For more context on our vendoring strategy, read our downstream repo maintenance guide.
Getting help
If you have any questions or feedback regarding the Grafana Agent:
- Ask a question on the Agent Slack channel. To invite yourself to the Grafana Slack, visit https://slack.grafana.com/ and join the #agent channel.
- Alternatively ask questions on the Discussions page.
- File an issue for bugs, issues and feature suggestions.
- Attend the Grafana Agent Community Call.
Contributing
Any contributions are welcome and details can be found in our contributors guide.