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Deploy Grafana Agent

Grafana Agent is a flexible, vendor-neutral telemetry collector. This flexibility means that Grafana Agent doesn’t enforce a specific deployment topology but can work in multiple scenarios.

This page lists common topologies used for deployments of Grafana Agent, when to consider using each topology, issues you may run into, and scaling considerations.

As a centralized collection service

Deploying Grafana Agent as a centralized service is recommended for collecting application telemetry. This topology allows you to use a smaller number of agents to coordinate service discovery, collection, and remote writing.

centralized-collection

Using this topology requires deploying the Agent on separate infrastructure, and making sure that agents can discover and reach these applications over the network. The main predictor for the size of the agent is the number of active metrics series it is scraping; a rule of thumb is approximately 10 KB of memory for each series. We recommend you start looking towards horizontal scaling around the 1 million active series mark.

Using Kubernetes StatefulSets

Deploying Grafana Agent as a StatefulSet is the recommended option for metrics collection. The persistent pod identifiers make it possible to consistently match volumes with pods so that you can use them for the WAL directory.

You can also use a Kubernetes deployment in cases where persistent storage is not required, such as a traces-only pipeline.

Pros

Cons

  • Requires running on separate infrastructure

Use for

  • Scalable telemetry collection

Don’t use for

  • Host-level metrics and logs

As a host daemon

Deploying one Grafana Agent per machine is required for collecting machine-level metrics and logs, such as node_exporter hardware and network metrics or journald system logs.

daemonset

Each Grafana Agent requires you to open an outgoing connection for each remote endpoint it’s shipping data to. This can lead to NAT port exhaustion on the egress infrastructure. Each egress IP can support up to (65535 - 1024 = 64511) outgoing connections on different ports. So, if all agents are shipping metrics and log data, an egress IP can support up to 32,255 agents.

Using Kubernetes DaemonSets

The simplest use case of the host daemon topology is a Kubernetes DaemonSet, and it is required for node-level observability (for example cAdvisor metrics) and collecting pod logs.

Pros

  • Doesn’t require running on separate infrastructure
  • Typically leads to smaller-sized agents
  • Lower network latency to instrumented applications

Cons

  • Requires planning a process for provisioning Grafana Agent on new machines, as well as keeping configuration up to date to avoid configuration drift
  • Not possible to scale agents independently when using Kubernetes DaemonSets
  • Scaling the topology can strain external APIs (like service discovery) and network infrastructure (like firewalls, proxy servers, and egress points)

Use for

  • Collecting machine-level metrics and logs (for example, node_exporter hardware metrics, Kubernetes pod logs)

Don’t use for

  • Scenarios where Grafana Agent grows so large it can become a noisy neighbor
  • Collecting an unpredictable amount of telemetry

As a container sidecar

Deploying Grafana Agent as a container sidecar is only recommended for short-lived applications or specialized agent deployments.

daemonset

Using Kubernetes pod sidecars

In a Kubernetes environment, the sidecar model consists of deploying Grafana Agent as an extra container on the pod. The pod’s controller, network configuration, enabled capabilities, and available resources are shared between the actual application and the sidecar agent.

Pros

  • Doesn’t require running on separate infrastructure
  • Straightforward networking with partner applications

Cons

  • Doesn’t scale separately
  • Makes resource consumption harder to monitor and predict
  • Agents do not have a life cycle of their own, making it harder to reason about things like recovering from network outages

Use for

  • Serverless services
  • Job/batch applications that work with a push model
  • Air-gapped applications that can’t be otherwise reached over the network

Don’t use for

  • Long-lived applications
  • Scenarios where the agent size grows so large it can become a noisy neighbor

For scalable ingestion of traces

For small workloads, it is normal to have just one Agent handle all incoming spans with no need of load balancing. However, for large workloads it is desirable to spread out the load of processing spans over multiple Agent instances.

To scale the Agent for trace ingestion, do the following:

  1. Set up the load_balancing section of the Agent’s traces config.
  2. Start multiple Agent instances, all with the same configuration, so that:
    • Each Agent load balances using the same strategy.
    • Each Agent processes spans in the same way.
  3. The cluster of Agents is now setup for load balancing. It works as follows:
    1. Any of the Agents can receive spans from instrumented applications via the configured receivers.
    2. When an Agent firstly receives spans, it will forward them to any of the Agents in the cluster according to the load_balancing configuration.

tail_sampling

If some of the spans for a trace end up in a different Agent, tail_sampling will not sample correctly. Enabling load_balancing is necessary if tail_sampling is enabled and when there could be more than one Agent instance processing spans for the same trace. load_balancing will make sure that all spans of a given trace will be processed by the same Agent instance.

spanmetrics

All spans for a given service.name must be processed by the same spanmetrics Agent. To make sure that this is the case, set up load_balancing with routing_key: service.

service_graphs

It is challenging to scale service_graphs over multiple Agent instances.

  • For service_graphs to work correctly, each “client” span must be paired with a “server” span in order to calculate metrics such as span duration.
  • If a “client” span goes to one Agent, but a “server” span goes to another Agent, then no single Agent will be able to pair the spans and a metric won’t be generated.

load_balancing can solve this problem partially if it is configured with routing_key: traceID.

  • Each Agent will then be able to calculate service graph for each “client”/“server” pair in a trace.
  • However, it is possible to have a span with similar “server”/“client” values in a different trace, processed by another Agent.
  • If two different Agents process similar “server”/“client” spans, they will generate the same service graph metric series.
  • If the series from two Agents are the same, this will lead to issues when writing them to the backend database.
  • Users could differentiate the series by adding a label such as "agent_id".
    • Unfortunately, there is currently no method in the Agent to aggregate those series from different Agents and merge them into one series.
    • A PromQL query could be used to aggregate the metrics from different Agents.
    • If the metrics are stored in Grafana Mimir, cardinality issues due to "agent_id" labels can be solved using Adaptive Metrics.

A simpler, more scalable alternative to generating service graph metrics in the Agent is to generate them entirely in the backend database. For example, service graphs can be generated in Grafana Cloud by the Tempo traces database.

Example Kubernetes configuration

You need to fill in correct OTLP credentials prior to running the above examples. The example above can be started by using k3d:

bash 
k3d cluster create grafana-agent-lb-test
kubectl apply -f kubernetes_config.yaml

To delete the cluster, run:

bash 
k3d cluster delete grafana-agent-lb-test