Setup monitoring agents

Monitoring agents run on your host (for example, virtual machines, Kubernetes node, Nomad cluster) and send metrics to a centralized monitoring platform (for example, Grafana or DataDog). Common monitoring agents include Prometheus, Telegraf, and StatsD.

If you improperly configure the monitoring agent, the centralized monitoring platform will not be able to collect data for the host and all its services.

Each monitoring agent has specific installation and configuration methods, but there are common best practices that apply to them.

Securely manage monitoring agents secrets
Configure and deploy your monitoring agent on VMs
Configure monitoring agent on container orchestrators (Kubernetes and Nomad)
Platform agnostic monitoring through service mesh

Tip

While monitoring agents can collect some metrics automatically, obtaining comprehensive telemetry data often requires instrumenting your application code directly. To understand how to implement instrumentation, refer to How OpenTelemetry facilitates instrumentation.

Next steps

In this section of Setup monitoring agents, you learned about monitoring agents and the high-level workflow. Set up monitoring agents is part of the Define and automate processes pillar.

Refer to the following documents to learn how to configure and deploy monitoring agents.