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Grafana Agent direct deployment

Grafana Agent is a lightweight telemetry collector based on Prometheus that only performs its scraping and remote_write functions. Agent can also collect metrics, logs, and traces for storage in Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise, as well as OSS deployments of Loki (logs), and Tempo (traces), Prometheus (metrics), and Cortex (metrics). Grafana Agent also contains several integrations (embedded metrics exporters) like node-exporter, a MySQL exporter, and many more.

Note: While it is theoretically possible to configure the same Agent DaemonSet to collect and ship both metrics and logs to Grafana Cloud, support for this deployment model is currently minimal and under active development. For best results, deploy the following:

  • A StatefulSet or Deployment of Agents to collect metrics (similar to how you’d roll out Prometheus)
  • A DaemonSet to collect logs
  • A Deployment or DaemonSet to collect traces
  • Additional Deployments and/or DaemonSets to export metrics using embedded integrations

Metrics

To learn how to scrape metrics, please see Grafana Agent Metrics Kubernetes quickstart.

Logs

Grafana Agent contains an embedded Promtail that allows you ship logs to Loki using the same Agent binary. For instructions on deploying Grafana Agent for logs, see Grafana Agent Logs Kubernetes quickstart.

Traces

You can ship traces to Grafana Cloud using Grafana Agent. To learn how, see Grafana Agent Traces Kubernetes quickstart.

To learn more about Grafana Agent and traces, see the Grafana Agent Tempo docs.

Grafana Agent Operator (beta)

Grafana Agent Operator is a Prometheus Operator inspired project that allows you configure Grafana Agent using Kubernetes custom resources. To learn more, see Kubernetes Agent Operator (beta).

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