Introduction to Grafana Agent

Grafana Agent is a flexible, high performance, vendor-neutral telemetry collector. It’s fully compatible with the most popular open source observability standards such as OpenTelemetry (OTel) and Prometheus.

Grafana Agent is available in three different variants:

Static mode: The original Grafana Agent.
Static mode Kubernetes operator: The Kubernetes operator for Static mode.
Flow mode: The new, component-based Grafana Agent.

Stability

Project	Stability
Static mode	Stable
Static mode Kubernetes operator	Beta
Flow mode	Stable

Choose which variant of Grafana Agent to run

NOTE: You don’t have to pick just one variant; it’s possible to mix-and-match installations of Grafana Agent.

Compare variants

Each variant of Grafana Agent provides a different level of functionality. The following tables compare Grafana Agent Flow mode with Static mode, Operator, OpenTelemetry, and Prometheus.

Core telemetry

	Grafana Agent Flow mode	Grafana Agent Static mode	Grafana Agent Operator	OpenTelemetry Collector	Prometheus Agent mode
Metrics	Prometheus, OTel	Prometheus	Prometheus	OTel	Prometheus
Logs	Loki, OTel	Loki	Loki	OTel	No
Traces	OTel	OTel	OTel	OTel	No
Profiles	Pyroscope	No	No	Planned	No

OSS features

	Grafana Agent Flow mode	Grafana Agent Static mode	Grafana Agent Operator	OpenTelemetry Collector	Prometheus Agent mode
Kubernetes native	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No
Clustering	Yes	No	No	No	No
Prometheus rules	Yes	No	No	No	No
Native Vault support	Yes	No	No	No	No

Grafana Cloud solutions

	Grafana Agent Flow mode	Grafana Agent Static mode	Grafana Agent Operator	OpenTelemetry Collector	Prometheus Agent mode
Official vendor support	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Cloud integrations	Some	Yes	Some	No	No
Kubernetes monitoring	Yes	Yes, custom	Yes	No	Yes, custom
Application observability	Yes	No	No	Yes	No

Static mode

Static mode is the original variant of Grafana Agent, introduced on March 3, 2020. Static mode is the most mature variant of Grafana Agent.

You should run Static mode when:

Maturity: You need to use the most mature version of Grafana Agent.
Grafana Cloud integrations: You need to use Grafana Agent with Grafana Cloud integrations.

Static mode Kubernetes operator

Note
Grafana Agent version 0.37 and newer provides Prometheus Operator compatibility in Flow mode. You should use Grafana Agent Flow mode for all new Grafana Agent deployments.

The Static mode Kubernetes operator is a variant of Grafana Agent introduced on June 17, 2021. It’s currently in beta.

The Static mode Kubernetes operator provides compatibility with Prometheus Operator, allowing static mode to support resources from Prometheus Operator, such as ServiceMonitors, PodMonitors, and Probes.

You should run the Static mode Kubernetes operator when:

Prometheus Operator compatibility: You need to be able to consume ServiceMonitors, PodMonitors, and Probes from the Prometheus Operator project for collecting Prometheus metrics.

Flow mode

Flow mode is a stable variant of Grafana Agent, introduced on September 29, 2022.

Grafana Agent Flow mode focuses on vendor neutrality, ease-of-use, improved debugging, and ability to adapt to the needs of power users by adopting a configuration-as-code model.

You should run Flow mode when:

You need functionality unique to Flow mode:
- Improved debugging: You need to more easily debug configuration issues using a UI.
- Full OpenTelemetry support: Support for collecting OpenTelemetry metrics, logs, and traces.
- PrometheusRule support: Support for the PrometheusRule resource from the Prometheus Operator project for configuring Grafana Mimir.
- Ecosystem transformation: You need to be able to convert Prometheus and Loki pipelines to and from OpenTelmetry Collector pipelines.
- Grafana Pyroscope support: Support for collecting profiles for Grafana Pyroscope.

BoringCrypto

BoringCrypto is an EXPERIMENTAL feature for building Grafana Agent binaries and images with BoringCrypto enabled. Builds and Docker images for Linux arm64/amd64 are made available.

Feedback

Introduction to Grafana Agent

Stability