# How do you handle Elastic Agent Policies and Integrations that only apply to some systems?

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-do-you-handle-elastic-agent-policies-and-integrations-that-only-apply-to-some-systems/322168>\
**Category:** Elastic Agent\
**Tags:** integrations\
**Created:** [December 29, 2022, 4:15pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-do-you-handle-elastic-agent-policies-and-integrations-that-only-apply-to-some-systems/322168 "2022-12-29T16:15:09Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![BenB196](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/benb196/32/83401_2.png) [@BenB196](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/BenB196)\
**Post date:** [December 29, 2022, 4:15pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-do-you-handle-elastic-agent-policies-and-integrations-that-only-apply-to-some-systems/322168/1 "2022-12-29T16:15:09Z")

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Hi All,

This is more of a general question looking for input from others how they handle Elastic Agent policies when there is an integration that only needs to be deployed to a subset of systems.

General concept of my current setup, I have a "base" Elastic Agent policy for each of my environments, and this "base" policy has integrations that all systems take advantage of (ex: system integration)

What I'm not sure about is how to best proceed with integrations that are narrower in scope (ex: Windows IIS logs, Jira logs, Confluence logs, etc...)

I have 2 main ideas/solutions, but I don't think either of them are "great":

1. Clone the "base" policy and make a specific policy and assign the required systems to it
  - Pros
    - Easy to identify what integrations are installed

  - Cons
    - More management overhead
      - If you make a change to one of the "base" integrations, this would need to be populated to a lot more agent policies

    - Need to be aware of what systems are in what policy to make sure the data is being collected

2. Add the integrations to the "base" policy
  - Pros
    - Simple setup everything is basically in one place

  - Cons
    - Potential to get very messy if there are a significant number of integrations
    - I suspect the agent will throw a lot of errors if it looks for something for one integration that doesn't exist on most systems.

Ideally something on the Elastic end, like parent-child agent policies would be an ideal solution, but without that, does anyone use one of these methods, or have another method they're using for this?

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [January 26, 2023, 4:15pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-do-you-handle-elastic-agent-policies-and-integrations-that-only-apply-to-some-systems/322168/2 "2023-01-26T16:15:26Z")

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