Ops Agent overview

The Ops Agent is the primary agent for collecting telemetry from your Compute Engine instances. Combining logging and metrics into a single agent, the Ops Agent uses Fluent Bit for logs, which supports high-throughput logging, and the OpenTelemetry Collector for metrics.

You can configure the Ops Agent to support parsing of log files from third-party applications. For more information, see Logging configurations.

To install the Ops Agent, see Installing the Ops Agent.

Ops Agent features

Overall features include:

• Single download and installation/upgrade process.
• Simple, unified, YAML-based configuration.
• Support for standard Linux and Windows distros.

Logging features include:

• Standard system logs (/var/log/syslog and /var/log/messages for Linux, Windows Event Log) collected with no setup.
• High throughput capability, taking full advantage of multi-core architecture.
• Efficient resource (e.g. memory, CPU) management.
• Custom log files.
• JSON logs.
• Plain text logs.
• Regex-based parsing.
• JSON-based parsing.

The Ops Agent doesn't directly support automatic log parsing for third-party applications, but you can configure the Ops Agent to parse these files. For more information, see Logging configurations.

Monitoring features include:

• System metrics collected with no setup.

• Metrics collected include:

  • cpu metrics
  • disk metrics
  • iis metrics (Windows only)
  • interface metrics
  • memory metrics
  • mssql metrics (Windows only)
  • pagefile metrics (Windows only)
  • swap metrics
  • network metrics
  • processes metrics

  • select internal agent metrics:

    • api_request_count
    • memory_usage
    • monitoring/point_count
    • uptime

Note: Some metrics are only available on VMs running on Linux. See detailed metrics definition and whether they are Linux only in the agent metrics page.

Virtual machine instances

You can install the Ops Agent on Compute Engine instances.

To create a Compute Engine instance, see Compute Engine getting started guide.

Operating systems

The Ops Agent supports the following operating systems on compatible VM instances.

Linux operating systems

The agent supports the following Linux operating systems:

• CentOS 7
• CentOS 8
• Rocky Linux 8
• RHEL 7: rhel-7, rhel-7-6-sap-ha, rhel-7-7-sap-ha, rhel-7-9-sap-ha
• RHEL 8: rhel-8, rhel-8-1-sap-ha, rhel-8-2-sap-ha, rhel-8-4-sap-ha
• Debian 9 (Stretch)
• Debian 10 (Buster)
• Debian 11 (Bullseye)
• Ubuntu LTS 18.04 (Bionic Beaver): ubuntu-1804-lts, ubuntu-minimal-1804-lts
• Ubuntu LTS 20.04 (Focal Fossa): ubuntu-2004-lts, ubuntu-minimal-2004-lts
• Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri): ubuntu-2110, ubuntu-minimal-2110
• Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish): ubuntu-2204-lts, ubuntu-minimal-2204-lts
• SLES 12: sles-12, sles-12-sp3-sap, sles-12-sp4-sap, sles-12-sp5-sap
• SLES 15: sles-15, sles-15-sap, sles-15-sp1-sap, sles-15-sp2-sap
• OpenSUSE Leap 15: opensuse-leap (opensuse-leap-15-2-*, opensuse-leap-15-3-*)

Windows operating systems

Note: n1-standard-1 virtual machines are too small to run Windows and the Ops Agent, so you must use a larger VM.

The agent supports the following Windows operating systems:

• Windows Server: windows-2012-r2, windows-2016, windows-2019
• Windows Server Core: windows-2012-r2-core, windows-2016-core, windows-2019-core, windows-20h2-core

Agent access requirements

Installing the agent requires access to the following DNS name:

• Google Cloud package repository: packages.cloud.google.com

Running the agent requires access to the following DNS names:

• OAuth2 token server: www.googleapis.com

• Monitoring APIs: monitoring.googleapis.com

• Logging APIs: logging.googleapis.com

Deprecation policy

The Ops Agent is subject to the Agents deprecation policy.

For deprecation information for legacy features and versions, refer to Google Cloud's operations suite deprecations.

What's next

• To install the Ops Agent, see Installing the Ops Agent.