---
title: Elastic Agent breaking changes
description: Breaking changes can impact your Elastic applications, potentially disrupting normal operations. Before you upgrade, carefully review the Elastic Agent...
url: https://www.elastic.co/elastic/docs-builder/docs/2659/release-notes/elastic-agent/breaking-changes
products:
  - Elastic Agent
applies_to:
  - Elastic Stack: Generally available
---

# Elastic Agent breaking changes
Breaking changes can impact your Elastic applications, potentially disrupting normal operations. Before you upgrade, carefully review the Elastic Agent breaking changes and take the necessary steps to mitigate any issues. To learn how to upgrade, check [Upgrade](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-builder/docs/2659/deploy-manage/upgrade).

## 9.3.1

_No breaking changes._

## 9.3.0

<dropdown title="Remove Elastic Agent global CLI flags from `otel` subcommand.">
  The `elastic-agent otel` subcommand no longer accepts global CLI flags that had no effect: `-c`, `--path.home`, `--path.home.unversioned`, `--path.config`, `--path.logs`, `--path.socket` and `--path.downloads`.For more information, check [#12187](https://github.com/elastic/elastic-agent/pull/12187).**Impact**Removal of these flags can result in otel subcommand failure, if they being are used. These flags had no effect on the otel subcommand behavior.
</dropdown>


## 9.2.6

_No breaking changes._

## 9.2.5

_No breaking changes._

## 9.2.4

_No breaking changes._

## 9.2.3

_No breaking changes._

## 9.2.2

_No breaking changes._

## 9.2.1

_No breaking changes._

## 9.2.0build202510300150

_No breaking changes._

## 9.2.0

<dropdown title="Remove the elasticinframetrics processor from Otel configurations.">
  Removes the elasticinframetrics processor along with the elasticsearch exporter in ECS mode configurations.For more information, check [#9112](https://github.com/elastic/elastic-agent/pull/9112)[#8958](https://github.com/elastic/elastic-agent/issues/8958).
</dropdown>

<dropdown title="Remove Elastic Trace processor from EDOT Collector.">
  It is replaced with the Elastic APM processor.For more information, check [#10378](https://github.com/elastic/elastic-agent/pull/10378).
</dropdown>


## 9.1.10

_No breaking changes._

## 9.1.9

_No breaking changes._

## 9.1.8

_No breaking changes._

## 9.1.7

_No breaking changes._

## 9.1.6

_No breaking changes._

## 9.1.5

_No breaking changes._

## 9.1.4

_No breaking changes._

## 9.1.3

_No breaking changes._

## 9.1.2

_No breaking changes._

## 9.1.1

_No breaking changes._

## 9.1.0

_No breaking changes._

## 9.0.8

_No breaking changes._

## 9.0.7

_No breaking changes._

## 9.0.6

_No breaking changes._

## 9.0.5

_No breaking changes._

## 9.0.4

_No breaking changes._

## 9.0.3

_No breaking changes._

## 9.0.2

_No breaking changes._

## 9.0.1

<dropdown title="[otel] Disable process scraper of hostmetrics receiver.">
  The process scraper collects metrics for all available processes of a host without an easy way to limit
  this to only report top N process for example. This results in quite big amount of timeseries.
  Since this is not quite critical for any of the available UIs or dashboards we decide to disable
  it temporarily until we find a better solution. Users that specifically need these metrics
  can also enable it back manually.
  Related to [https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/issues/39423](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/issues/39423).For more information, check [#7894](https://github.com/elastic/elastic-agent/pull/7894).
</dropdown>


## 9.0.0

<dropdown title="Removed cloud defend support for Elastic Agent">
  Support for `cloud-defend` (Defend for Containers) has been removed. The package has been removed from the Elastic Agent packaging scripts and template Kubernetes files.For more information, check [#5481](https://github.com/elastic/elastic-agent/pull/5481).
</dropdown>

<dropdown title="Removed username and password default values for Elastic Agent">
  The default values for `username` and `password` have been removed for when Elastic Agent is running in container mode. The Elasticsearch `api_key` can now be set in that mode using the `ELASTICSEARCH_API_KEY` environment variable.For more information, check [#5536](https://github.com/elastic/elastic-agent/pull/5536).
</dropdown>

<dropdown title="Changed Ubuntu-based Docker images for Elastic Agent">
  The default Ubuntu-based Docker images used for Elastic Agent have been changed to UBI-minimal-based images, to reduce the overall footprint of the agent Docker images and to improve compliance with enterprise standards.For more information, check [#6427](https://github.com/elastic/elastic-agent/pull/6427).
</dropdown>

<dropdown title="Removed --path.install flag declaration from Elastic Agent paths command">
  The deprecated `--path.install` flag declaration has been removed from the Elastic Agent `paths` command and its use removed from the `container` and `enroll` commands.For more information, check [#6461](https://github.com/elastic/elastic-agent/pull/6461) and [#2489](https://github.com/elastic/elastic-agent/pull/2489).
</dropdown>

<dropdown title="Changed the default Elastic Agent installation and upgrade">
  The default Elastic Agent installation and ugprade have been changed to include only the `agentbeat`, `endpoint-security` and `pf-host-agent` components.Additional components such as `apm` or `fleet` require passing the `--install-servers` flag or setting the `ELASTIC_AGENT_FLAVOR=servers` environment variable.For more information, check [#6542](https://github.com/elastic/elastic-agent/pull/6542).
</dropdown>