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Caution

Grafana Alloy is the new name for our distribution of the OTel collector. Grafana Agent has been deprecated and is in Long-Term Support (LTS) through October 31, 2025. Grafana Agent will reach an End-of-Life (EOL) on November 1, 2025. Read more about why we recommend migrating to Grafana Alloy.

Important: This documentation is about an older version. It's relevant only to the release noted, many of the features and functions have been updated or replaced. Please view the current version.

DocumentationGrafana AgentGrafana Agent Operator
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Grafana Agent Operator

The Grafana Agent Operator is a Kubernetes operator that makes it easier to deploy Grafana Agent and collect telemetry data from your Pods. Agent Operator is currently in Beta, and is subject to change.

Note: If you are shipping your data to Grafana Cloud, use Kubernetes Monitoring to set up Agent Operator. Kubernetes Monitoring provides a simplified approach and preconfigured dashboards and alerts.

Grafana Agent Operator uses Kubernetes custom resources to simplify the deployment and configuration of Grafana Agents. Agent Operator installs and manages Agents, and dynamically watches resources on your Kubernetes clusters, helping to discover Pods, Services, and Ingresses to scrape. This dynamic, declarative approach works well for decentralized deployments. You can provide your own Service Discovery (SD) scrape configs to indicate how your Pods should be monitored without explicitly defining the entire monitoring configuration yourself.

Metric collection is based on the Prometheus Operator and supports the official v1 ServiceMonitor, PodMonitor, and Probe CRDs from the project. These custom resources represent abstractions for monitoring Services, Pods, and Ingresses. They are especially useful for Helm users, where manually writing a generic SD to match all your charts can be difficult or where manually writing a specific SD for each chart can be tedious.

The following sections describe how to use Grafana Agent Operator.

TopicDescribes
Install Grafana Agent Operator with HelmHow to deploy the Grafana Agent Operator into your Kubernetes cluster using the grafana-agent-operator Helm chart.
Install Grafana Agent OperatorHow to deploy the Grafana Agent Operator into your Kubernetes cluster without using Helm.
Deploy the Grafana Agent Operator resourcesHow to roll out the Grafana Agent Operator custom resources, needed to begin monitoring your cluster. Complete this procedure after installing Grafana Agent Operator—either with or without Helm.
Grafana Agent Operator architectureLearn about the resources used by Agent Operator to collect telemetry data and how it discovers the hierarchy of custom resources, continually reconciling the hierarchy.