Ops Agent overview

The Ops Agent is the primary agent for collecting telemetry from your Compute Engine instances. Combining the collection of logs, metrics, and traces into a single process, the Ops Agent uses Fluent Bit for logs, which supports high-throughput logging, and the OpenTelemetry Collector for metrics and traces.

For information about installing the Ops Agent, see the following:

Ops Agent features

Overall features include:

Logging features

Logging features include:

  • Improved performance compared to the legacy Logging Agent:

    • High throughput capability, taking full advantage of multi-core architecture.
    • Efficient resource (e.g. memory, CPU) management.

  • Collecting logs from various sources:

    • Standard system logs (/var/log/syslog and /var/log/messages for Linux, Windows Event Log) collected with no configuration.
    • File-based logs with customizable paths and refresh interval.
    • Journald daemon / systemd logs.
    • Logs over TCP protocol.
    • Logs over Forward protocol (used by Fluent Bit and Fluentd).

  • Flexible processing:

    • Parse text logs into structured logs: JSON-based and regular-expression-based parsing.
    • Modify log entries by removing, renaming, or setting fields.
    • Exclude logs based on labels and regular expressions.
    • Detect and concatenate multiline language-exception logs from Java, Python, and Golang.

  • Third-party application support

    • Curated third-party application log integration that recognizes common app log file paths and formats.

Monitoring features

Monitoring features include:

The Cloud Monitoring Metrics Management page provides information that can help you control the amount you spend on billable metrics without affecting observability. The Metrics Management page reports the following information:

  • Ingestion volumes for both byte- and sample-based billing, across metric domains and for individual metrics.
  • Data about labels and cardinality of metrics.
  • Number of reads for each metric.
  • Use of metrics in alerting policies and custom dashboards.
  • Rate of metric-write errors.

You can also use the Metrics Management to exclude unneeded metrics, eliminating the cost of ingesting them. For more information about the Metrics Management page, see View and manage metric usage.

Trace features

Trace features include:

Virtual machine instances

You can install the Ops Agent on Compute Engine instances. To create a Compute Engine instance, see the Compute Engine getting started guide.

The following types of VM instances belong to managed services that implement service-specific Monitoring support. Don't try to manually install or configure the Ops Agent on them:

  • App Engine standard has built-in Monitoring support. Agents aren't needed.
  • App Engine flexible environment instances have pre-installed agents with service-specific configurations.
  • Dataflow instances have pre-installed legacy Monitoring agents with service-specific configurations.

  • Dataproc instances prior to image version 2.2 have pre-installed legacy Monitoring agents with service-specific configurations.

    You can install the Ops Agent on Dataproc clusters that use image version 2.2 and later to collect syslog logs and host metrics. For more information, see Dataproc 2.2.x release versions.

  • Google Kubernetes Engine node instances:

Operating systems

The Ops Agent supports the following operating systems on compatible VM instances. For information about Arm VM instances, see Support for Compute Engine Arm VMs.

Linux operating systems

The agent supports the following Linux operating systems:

  • Rocky Linux 8
  • Rocky Linux 9
  • RHEL 7: rhel-7, rhel-7-9-sap-ha
  • RHEL 8: rhel-8, rhel-8-4-sap-ha, rhel-8-6-sap-ha, rhel-8-8-sap-ha
  • RHEL 9: rhel-9
  • Debian 11 (Bullseye)
  • Debian 12 (Bookworm)
  • Deep Learning VM Images based on Debian 11 (Bullseye)
  • Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa): ubuntu-2004-lts, ubuntu-minimal-2004-lts
  • Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish): ubuntu-2204-lts, ubuntu-minimal-2204-lts
  • Ubuntu 23.10 (Mantic Minotaur): ubuntu-2310-amd64, ubuntu-minimal-2310-amd64
  • Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat): ubuntu-2404-lts-amd64, ubuntu-minimal-2404-lts-amd64
  • Ubuntu 24.10 (Oracular Oriole): ubuntu-2410-amd64, ubuntu-minimal-2410-amd64
  • SLES 12: sles-12, sles-12-sp5-sap
  • SLES 15: sles-15, sles-15-sp2-sap, sles-15-sp3-sap, sles-15-sp4-sap, sles-15-sp5-sap, sles-15-sp6-sap
  • OpenSUSE Leap 15: opensuse-leap (opensuse-leap-15-3-*, opensuse-leap-15-4-*)
Support for Compute Engine Arm VMs

The Ops Agent supports Compute Engine C4A and Tau T2A Arm VM instances. The Ops Agent is supported for Arm VMs on the following OS images:

  • Debian 12 (Bookworm): Ops Agent version 2.44.0
  • Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa): Ops Agent version 2.39.0
  • Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish): Ops Agent version 2.42.0
  • Ubuntu 23.10 (Mantic Minotaur): Ops Agent version 2.44.0
  • Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat): Ops Agent version 2.47.0
  • Ubuntu 24.10 (Oracular Oriole): Ops Agent version 2.52.0
  • RHEL 9: Ops Agent version 2.40.0
  • Rocky Linux 8: Ops Agent version 2.51.0
  • Rocky Linux 9: Ops Agent version 2.40.0
  • SLES 15: Ops Agent version 2.43.0
  • OpenSUSE Leap 15: Ops Agent version 2.43.0

The Ops Agent is supported on a subset of the images supported by Compute Engine. For more information about Compute Engine Arm VMs, see Creating and starting an Arm VM instance.

Windows operating systems

The agent supports the following Windows operating systems:

  • Windows Server: windows-2016, windows-2019, windows-2022
  • Windows Server Core: windows-2016-core, windows-2019-core, windows-20h2-core, windows-2022-core

Agent access requirements

Installing the agent requires access to the following DNS names:

  • Google Cloud package repository: packages.cloud.google.com

  • Google downloads subdomain: dl.google.com

Running the agent requires access to the following DNS names:

  • OAuth2 token server: oauth2.googleapis.com

    Earlier versions of the agent may require access to www.googleapis.com (full URL: https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v3/token).

    If you're using an older version of the agent, it's recommended that you upgrade your agent to the latest version.

  • Monitoring APIs: monitoring.googleapis.com

  • Logging APIs: logging.googleapis.com

The agent uses TCP ports within the VM for inter-process communication. The following ports, which don't need to be open externally, must be available to the agent on your VM:

  • 20201

  • 20202

Deprecation policy

The Ops Agent is subject to the Agents deprecation policy.

For deprecation information for legacy features and versions, refer to Google Cloud Observability deprecations.

Pricing

If you install the Ops Agent, then you might be charged for the metrics, logs, or traces that the agent sends to your Google Cloud project. For pricing information, see the following documents:

To collect OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) traces, you must configure the agent to collect traces from an instrumented application; for more information, see Collect (OTLP) traces with the Ops Agent.

What's next