Command-line flags

Command-line flags are used to configure settings of Grafana Agent which cannot be updated at runtime.

All flags may be prefixed with either one hyphen or two (i.e., both -config.file and --config.file are valid).

Note: There may be flags returned by -help which are not listed here; this document only lists flags that do not have an equivalent in the YAML file.

Basic

-version: Print out version information
-help: Print out help

Experimental feature flags

Grafana Agent has some experimental features that require being enabled through an -enable-features flag. This flag takes a comma-delimited list of feature names to enable.

Valid feature names are:

remote-configs: Enable retrieving config files over HTTP/HTTPS
integrations-next: Enable revamp of the integrations subsystem
extra-scrape-metrics: When enabled, additional time series are exposed for each metrics instance scrape. See Extra scrape metrics.
agent-management: Enable support for agent management.

Report information usage

By default, Grafana Agent sends anonymous, but uniquely-identifiable usage information from your running Grafana Agent instance to Grafana Labs. These statistics are sent to stats.grafana.org.

Statistics help us better understand how Grafana Agent is used. This helps us prioritize features and documentation.

The usage information includes the following details:

A randomly generated and an anonymous unique ID (UUID).
Timestamp of when the UID was first generated.
Timestamp of when the report was created (by default, every 4h).
Version of running Grafana Agent.
Operating system Grafana Agent is running on.
System architecture Grafana Agent is running on.
List of enabled feature flags.
List of enabled integrations.

This list may change over time. All newly reported data will also be documented in the CHANGELOG.

If you would like to disable the reporting, Grafana Agent provides the flag -disable-reporting to stop the reporting.

Support bundles

Grafana Agent allows the exporting of ‘support bundles’ on the /-/support endpoint. Support bundles are zip files containing commonly-used information that provide a baseline for debugging issues with the Agent.

Support bundles contain all information in plain text, so that they can be inspected before sharing to verify that no sensitive information has leaked.

Support bundles contain the following data:

agent-config.yaml contains the current agent configuration (when the -config.enable-read-api flag is passed).
agent-logs.txt contains the agent logs during the bundle generation.
agent-metadata.yaml contains the agent’s build version, operating system, architecture, uptime, plus a string payload defining which extra agent features have been enabled via command-line flags.
agent-metrics-instances.json and agent-metrics-targets.json contain the active metric subsystem instances, and the discovered scraped targets for each one.
agent-logs-instances.json and agent-logs-targets.json contains the active logs subsystem instances and the discovered log targets for each one.
agent-metrics.txt contains a snapshot of the agent’s internal metrics.
The pprof/ directory contains Go runtime profiling data (CPU, heap, goroutine, mutex, block profiles) as exported by the pprof package.

To disable the endpoint that exports these support bundles, you can pass in the -disable-support-bundle command-line flag.

Configuration file

-config.file: Path to the configuration file to load. May be an HTTP(s) URL when the remote-configs feature is enabled.
-config.file.type: Type of file which -config.file refers to (default yaml). Valid values are yaml and dynamic.
-config.expand-env: Expand environment variables in the loaded configuration file
-config.enable-read-api: Enables the /-/config and /agent/api/v1/configs/{name} API endpoints to print YAML configuration

Remote Configuration

These flags require the remote-configs feature to be enabled:

-config.url.basic-auth-user: Basic Authentication username to use when fetching the remote configuration file -config.url.basic-auth-password-file: File containing a Basic Authentication password to use when fetching the remote configuration file

Server

-server.register-instrumentation: Expose the /metrics and /debug/pprof/ instrumentation handlers over HTTP (default true)
-server.graceful-shutdown-timeout: Timeout for a graceful server shutdown
-server.log.source-ips.enabled: Whether to log IP addresses of incoming requests
-server.log.source-ips.header: Header field to extract incoming IP requests from (defaults to Forwarded, X-Real-IP, X-Forwarded-For)
-server.log.source-ips.regex: Regex to extract the IP out of the read header, using the first capture group as the IP address
-server.http.network: HTTP server listen network (default tcp)
-server.http.address: HTTP server listen:port (default 127.0.0.1:12345)
-server.http.enable-tls: Enable TLS for the HTTP server
-server.http.conn-limit: Maximum number of simultaneous HTTP connections
-server.http.idle-timeout: HTTP server idle timeout
-server.http.read-timeout: HTTP server read timeout
-server.http.write-timeout: HTTP server write timeout
-server.http.in-memory-addr: Internal address used for the agent to make in-memory HTTP connections to itself. (default agent.internal:12345) The port number specified here is virtual and does not open a real network port.
-server.grpc.network gRPC server listen network (default grpc)
-server.grpc.address: gRPC server listen host:port (default 127.0.0.1:12346)
-server.grpc.enable-tls: Enable TLS for the gRPC server
-server.grpc.conn-limit: Maximum number of simultaneous gRPC connections
-server.grpc.keepalive.max-connection-age Maximum age for any gRPC connection for a graceful shutdown
-server.grpc.keepalive.max-connection-age-grace Grace period to forcibly close connections after a graceful shutdown starts
-server.grpc.keepalive.max-connection-idle Time to wait before closing idle gRPC connections
-server.grpc.keepalive.min-time-between-pings Maximum frequency that clients may send pings at
-server.grpc.keepalive.ping-without-stream-allowed Allow clients to send pings without having a gRPC stream
-server.grpc.keepalive.time Frequency to send keepalive pings from the server
-server.grpc.keepalive.timeout How long to wait for a keepalive pong before closing the connection
-server.grpc.max-concurrent-streams Maximum number of concurrent gRPC streams (0 = unlimited)
-server.grpc.max-recv-msg-size-bytes Maximum size in bytes for received gRPC messages
-server.grpc.max-send-msg-size-bytes Maximum size in bytes for send gRPC messages
-server.grpc.in-memory-addr: Internal address used for the agent to make in-memory gRPC connections to itself. (default agent.internal:12346). The port number specified here is virtual and does not open a real network port.