Thanks @leandrojmp , as usual your response is very accurate and useful.
In some cases, I have systems that are producing massive quantities of logs.
In those cases I have seen Elastic-Agent 8.4.2 become a zombie process
and sometimes elastic-agent uses so much CPU that it starves other components on the system.
I have upgraded my system to to Elastic 8.9.0 and my agents to Elastic-Agent 8.9.0, so hopefully
the problems I saw with 8.4.2 are gone.
But at the same time I am looking at alternatives to elastic-agent for shipping logs to Elasticsearch.
I may be able to live without some of the features like custom pipelines and integrations for this particular use case.