[REQUEST]: 9.0 Documentation for new agent installation flavors

[cmacknz]

Description

In 9.0 there is a breaking change introducing the concept of an Elastic Agent installation flavor. Installation flavors control which executables are kept when the Elastic Agent is installed as a way to minimize its disk footprint. There will initially be two flavors in 9.0.

The default "basic" flavor is the new default behavior when Elastic Agent is installed through the .zip, .tar.gz, .deb, .rpm, and .msi packages. A new elastic-agent-slim Docker container is introduced matching the basic flavor of the other packages. The basic flavor includes only:

• agentbeat, used to implement all Beats based integrations.
• endpoint-security, used to implement Elastic Defend
• pf-host-agent, used to collect profiling data from hosts as part of Universal Profiling.

The remaining components are only included in the "servers" flavor. The servers flavor can be selected using elastic-agent install --install-servers on the command line or ELATIC_AGENT_FLAVOR=servers for the RPM and DEB packages. The existing elastic-agent and elastic-agent-complete Docker containers are unchanged and contain the components from the servers flavor. The servers flavor includes the basic components and additionally:

• cloudbeat, implement cloud security posture management integrations. https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/security/current/cspm.html
• apm-server, implementing Elastic's APM Server see https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/observability/current/apm-getting-started-apm-server.html
• fleet-server, implementing the Fleet Server enabling Fleet management of Elastic Agents.
• pf-elastic-symbolizer, a server side component of Elastic's universal profiling solution.
• pf-elastic-collector, a server side component of Elastic's universal profiling solution.

Resources

• https://github.com/elastic/ingest-dev/issues/4372
• EDOT-Collector Docker Images elastic-agent#6764
• Changes to binary distribution elastic-agent#6542
• DEB/RPM not defaulting to basic agent elastic-agent#6637

Collaboration

The product team will provide the initial content.

Point of contact.

Main contact: @nimarezainia

Stakeholders: @cmacknz

[cmacknz]

A couple of DEB specific notes from manual testing in elastic/elastic-agent#6638.

The dpkg -r command to remove a package leaves the flavor file in place. Instead dpkg -P must be used to purge all package content and reset the flavor.

For both DEB and RPM, how the environment variable is set on the command line matters. You must use either sudo ELASTIC_AGENT_FLAVOR=servers ... or ELASTIC_AGENT_FLAVOR=servers sudo -E ... to preserve the environment variable value when using sudo. ELASTIC_AGENT_FLAVOR=servers sudo ... with the environment variable before sudo and without the -E will not work as the sudo command resets the environment content.

[kilfoyle]

Please see PR: elastic/docs-content#927