- Fleet and Elastic Agent Guide: other versions:
- Fleet and Elastic Agent overview
- Beats and Elastic Agent capabilities
- Quick starts
- Migrate from Beats to Elastic Agent
- Deployment models
- Install Elastic Agents
- Install Fleet-managed Elastic Agents
- Install standalone Elastic Agents (advanced users)
- Install Elastic Agents in a containerized environment
- Run Elastic Agent in a container
- Run Elastic Agent on Kubernetes managed by Fleet
- Advanced Elastic Agent configuration managed by Fleet
- Run Elastic Agent on GKE managed by Fleet
- Run Elastic Agent on Amazon EKS managed by Fleet
- Run Elastic Agent on Azure AKS managed by Fleet
- Run Elastic Agent Standalone on Kubernetes
- Scaling Elastic Agent on Kubernetes
- Using a custom ingest pipeline with the Kubernetes Integration
- Environment variables
- Installation layout
- Air-gapped environments
- Using a proxy server with Elastic Agent and Fleet
- Uninstall Elastic Agents from edge hosts
- Start and stop Elastic Agents on edge hosts
- Elastic Agent configuration encryption
- Secure connections
- Manage Elastic Agents in Fleet
- Configure standalone Elastic Agents
- Create a standalone Elastic Agent policy
- Structure of a config file
- Inputs
- Providers
- Outputs
- SSL/TLS
- Logging
- Feature flags
- Agent download
- Config file examples
- Grant standalone Elastic Agents access to Elasticsearch
- Example: Use standalone Elastic Agent with Elastic Cloud Serverless to monitor nginx
- Example: Use standalone Elastic Agent with Elasticsearch Service to monitor nginx
- Debug standalone Elastic Agents
- Kubernetes autodiscovery with Elastic Agent
- Monitoring
- Reference YAML
- Manage integrations
- Define processors
- Processor syntax
- add_cloud_metadata
- add_cloudfoundry_metadata
- add_docker_metadata
- add_fields
- add_host_metadata
- add_id
- add_kubernetes_metadata
- add_labels
- add_locale
- add_network_direction
- add_nomad_metadata
- add_observer_metadata
- add_process_metadata
- add_tags
- community_id
- convert
- copy_fields
- decode_base64_field
- decode_cef
- decode_csv_fields
- decode_duration
- decode_json_fields
- decode_xml
- decode_xml_wineventlog
- decompress_gzip_field
- detect_mime_type
- dissect
- dns
- drop_event
- drop_fields
- extract_array
- fingerprint
- include_fields
- move_fields
- parse_aws_vpc_flow_log
- rate_limit
- registered_domain
- rename
- replace
- script
- syslog
- timestamp
- translate_sid
- truncate_fields
- urldecode
- Command reference
- Troubleshoot
- Release notes
What is Fleet Server?
editWhat is Fleet Server?
editFleet Server is a component that connects Elastic Agents to Fleet. It supports many Elastic Agent connections and serves as a control plane for updating agent policies, collecting status information, and coordinating actions across Elastic Agents. It also provides a scalable architecture. As the size of your agent deployment grows, you can deploy additional Fleet Servers to manage the increased workload.
- On-premises Fleet Server is not currently available for use in an Elastic Cloud Serverless environment. We recommend using the hosted Fleet Server that is included and configured automatically in Serverless Observability and Security projects.
The following diagram shows how Elastic Agents communicate with Fleet Server to retrieve agent policies:
- When a new agent policy is created, the Fleet UI saves the policy to a Fleet index in Elasticsearch.
- To enroll in the policy, Elastic Agents send a request to Fleet Server, using the enrollment key generated for authentication.
- Fleet Server monitors Fleet indices, picks up the new agent policy from Elasticsearch, then ships the policy to all Elastic Agents enrolled in that policy. Fleet Server may also write updated policies to the Fleet index to manage coordination between agents.
- Elastic Agent uses configuration information in the policy to collect and send data to Elasticsearch.
- Elastic Agent checks in with Fleet Server for updates, maintaining an open connection.
- When a policy is updated, Fleet Server retrieves the updated policy from Elasticsearch and sends it to the connected Elastic Agents.
- To communicate with Fleet about the status of Elastic Agents and the policy rollout, Fleet Server writes updates to Fleet indices.
Service account
editFleet Server uses a service token to communicate with Elasticsearch, which contains
a fleet-server
service account. Each Fleet Server can use its own service
token, and you can share it across multiple servers (not recommended). The
advantage of using a separate token for each server is that you can invalidate
each one separately.
You can create a service token by either using the Fleet UI or the Elasticsearch API. For more information, refer to Deploy Fleet Server on-premises and Elasticsearch on Cloud or Deploy on-premises and self-managed, depending on your deployment model.
Fleet Server High-availability operations
editFleet Server is stateless. Connections to the Fleet Server therefore can be load balanced as long as the Fleet Server has capacity to accept more connections. Load balancing is done on a round-robin basis.
How you handle high-availability, fault-tolerance, and lifecycle management of Fleet Server depends on the deployment model you use.
Learn more
editTo learn more about deploying and scaling Fleet Server, refer to:
Fleet Server secrets configuration
editSecrets used to configure Fleet Server can either be directly specified in configuration or provided through secret files. See Fleet Server Secrets for more information.
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