Are there any issues or topics on shrinking elastic-agent's install size?

Elastic Stack Elastic Agent
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Today I ran into issues trying to install, and ended up figuring out that you need at least 1.7G of disk for Agent. It had been a while since I last looked at the minimum requirements for Elastic Agent.

Considering I remember using logstash-forwarder and topbeat at just a couple hundred (or even less, it's been years) MB combined, 1.7G seems excessive.

I did some searching to see if anyone had opened any issues or topics on trying to reduce that footprint, but so far I haven't found any.

So has anyone opened anything to try and figure out how to reduce that footprint?

In my specific case, I need to deploy to a bunch of servers that only have 4-10ish GB partitions. I need to use Agent so that I can get my metrics in TSDS's for the space savings there, so just switching to metricbeat directly isn't workable.

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I had and still have the same issue a couple of months ago and made a comment in this similar post.

Also, you may need twice that size, the 1.7 GB space is after the agent is installed, in the install process you may need space for the tar.gz, for the unpacked tar.gz on a temporary path and the final installed path, so you may need something around 4 GB to be able to install it in some cases.

The agent is too bloated because since version 8.6 it includes everything it needs, so even if you just want to use metricbeat the installation will have everything the other integrations may use.

When I looked there was this issue about a lightweight Elastic Agent for containers and some discussion about the size change on this another issue.

But I don't think that there is any public issue tracking this, maybe is just something internally.

1 Like
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Thanks for the links. I posted on Offer a lightweight Elastic Agent container · Issue #3364 · elastic/elastic-agent · GitHub

Have you, or anyone else, ever used Vector instead of Beats? Elasticsearch | Vector documentation is their docs on how to store data in ES.

If I'm reading that right, they don't seem to support Time Series Data Streams. Which nixes me using it for metrics, but it does make me wonder if there are other collectors that might do the job. Anyone know of any?

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Unfortunately I only used vector as a replacement for Logstash because of some logstash perfrormance issues, but I wouldn't expect it to support TSDS when not even Metricbeat by Elastic doesn't support.

I also commented on the github issue explaining my use case to see if this get some traction, the Elastic Agent is too bloated, 1.7 GB is too much, sometimes you just want a single log or metric collector.

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