I am following Example: Use standalone Elastic Agent with Elastic Cloud Serverless to monitor nginx. I am stuck at Step 6: Configure standalone Elastic Agent.
I have created an API key, an Elastic Agent policy, and added the NGINX Integration to the policy. My NGINX is in a container running Linux. I created a Dockerfile using the Elastic Agent install instructions for Linux that I got from the Add Agent UI.
FROM nginx
COPY elastic-agent.yml /etc/elastic-agent/elastic-agent.yml
RUN curl -L -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/beats/elastic-agent/elastic-agent-9.0.1-linux-arm64.tar.gz \
&& tar xzvf elastic-agent-9.0.1-linux-arm64.tar.gz \
&& cd elastic-agent-9.0.1-linux-arm64 \
&& ./elastic-agent install
Note that I removed from sudo command from ./elastic-agent install because sudo is not available on this image. However, I am the root user in the container so I don't think this is a problem.
The elastic-agent.yml file is the one I downloaded while creating the policy. It contains the api_key that I generated for this project. I verified that it was copied into the container.
When I run ./elastic-agent install I see the following error.
Elastic Agent will be installed at /opt/Elastic/Agent and will run as a service. Do you want to continue? [Y/n]:Y
Do you want to enroll this Agent into Fleet? [Y/n]:n
[ ==] Start Service failed, exiting... [1s] Installation failed to start 'elastic-agent' service.
[ ===] Uninstalled [1s] Error uninstalling. Printing logs
2025-05-12T22:20:04.141Z DEBUG [install] Loaded configuration from /elastic-agent-9.0.1-linux-arm64/elastic-agent.yml
2025-05-12T22:20:04.141Z DEBUG [install] Merged configuration from /elastic-agent-9.0.1-linux-arm64/elastic-agent.yml into result
2025-05-12T22:20:04.141Z DEBUG [install] Merged all configuration files from [/elastic-agent-9.0.1-linux-arm64/elastic-agent.yml], no external input files
2025-05-12T22:20:04.182Z DEBUG [install] Loaded configuration from /elastic-agent-9.0.1-linux-arm64/elastic-agent.yml
2025-05-12T22:20:04.182Z DEBUG [install] Merged configuration from /elastic-agent-9.0.1-linux-arm64/elastic-agent.yml into result
2025-05-12T22:20:04.182Z DEBUG [install] Merged all configuration files from [/elastic-agent-9.0.1-linux-arm64/elastic-agent.yml], no external input files
2025-05-12T22:20:04.182Z DEBUG [install.composable] Starting controller for composable inputs
2025-05-12T22:20:04.182Z DEBUG [install.composable] Started controller for composable inputs
2025-05-12T22:20:04.182Z DEBUG [install.composable] Computing new variable state for composable inputs
2025-05-12T22:20:04.182Z DEBUG [install.composable] Stopping controller for composable inputs
2025-05-12T22:20:04.182Z DEBUG [install.composable] Stopped controller for composable inputs
Error: error starting service: failed to start service (elastic-agent): exit status 1
For help, please see our troubleshooting guide at https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/fleet/9.0/fleet-troubleshooting.html
What does no external input files mean? How do I go about debugging this?