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.
• Proxy support.

Logging features include:

• Improved performance compared to the legacy Logging Agent:

  • High throughput capability, taking full advantage of multi-core architecture.
  • Efficient resource (e.g. memory, CPU) management.

• Collecting logs from various sources:

  • Standard system logs (/var/log/syslog and /var/log/messages for Linux, Windows Event Log) collected with no configuration.
  • File-based logs with customizable paths and refresh interval.
  • Journald daemon / systemd logs.
  • Logs over TCP protocol.
  • Logs over Forward protocol (used by Fluent Bit and Fluentd).

• Flexible processing:

  • Parse text logs into structured logs: JSON-based and regular-expression-based parsing.
  • Modify log entries by removing, renaming, or setting fields.
  • Exclude logs based on labels and regular expressions.
  • Detect and concatenate multiline language-exception logs for Java, Python, and Golang.

• Third-party application support

  • Curated third-party application log integration that recognizes common app log file paths and formats.

Monitoring features include:

• System metrics collected with no configuration. 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
  • agent self metrics:

• Third-party application support

  • Curated integrations for third-party application metrics, which collect common app metrics and offer sample dashboards and alert policies.

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

Note: The Ops Agent does not support VM instances with ARM processors.

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:

Note: For VMs with Container-Optimized OS, follow https://cloud.google.com/container-optimized-os/docs/how-to/logging for the logging solution instead.

• CentOS 7
• Rocky Linux 8
• Rocky Linux 9
• 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
• RHEL 9: rhel-9
• 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 LTS 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-sp1-sap, sles-15-sp2-sap, sles-15-sp3-sap, sles-15-sp4-sap
• OpenSUSE Leap 15: opensuse-leap (opensuse-leap-15-3-*, opensuse-leap-15-4-*)

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-2022
• Windows Server Core: windows-2012-r2-core, windows-2016-core, windows-2019-core, windows-20h2-core, windows-2022-core

Agent access requirements

Installing the agent requires access to the following DNS names:

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

• Google downloads subdomain: dl.google.com

Running the agent requires access to the following DNS names:

• OAuth2 token server: oauth2.googleapis.com

  Older versions of the agent may require access to www.googleapis.com (full URL: https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v3/token).

  If you're using an older version of the agent, it's recommended that you upgrade your agent to the latest version.

• Monitoring APIs: monitoring.googleapis.com

• Logging APIs: logging.googleapis.com

The agent uses TCP ports within the VM for inter-process communication. The following ports, which do not need to be open externally, must be available to the agent on your VM:

• 20201

• 20202

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.

Pricing

If you install the Ops Agent, then you might be charged for the metrics and logs that the agent sends to your Google Cloud project. For pricing information, see the following documents:

• Cloud Monitoring pricing
• Cloud Logging pricing

What's next

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