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Quickstart for hosts / VMs on Elastic Cloud Serverless

Learn how to set up the Elastic Agent and Elastic OTel SDKs on hosts and VMs with Elastic Cloud Serverless to collect host metrics, logs, and application traces. Send the data through OTLP to your Elastic Serverless project.

Use the Add data screen in Elastic Observability to generate install commands that are already configured with the values you need.

  1. Open Elastic Observability.
  2. Go to Add data.
  3. Select what you want to monitor.
  4. Follow the instructions.

Follow these steps to deploy the Elastic Agent and Elastic OTel SDKs with Elastic Cloud Serverless.

  1. Download the Elastic Agent

    Download the Elastic Agent for your operating system.

  2. Configure the Elastic Agent

    Follow these steps to retrieve the managed OTLP endpoint URL for your Serverless project:

    1. In Elastic Cloud Serverless, open your Observability project.
    2. Go to Add data → Application → OpenTelemetry.
    3. Select Managed OTLP Endpoint in the second step.
    4. Copy the OTLP endpoint configuration value.
    5. Select Create API Key to generate an API key.

    Replace <ELASTIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT> and <ELASTIC_API_KEY> before applying the following command.

    ELASTIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT=<ELASTIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT> && \
ELASTIC_API_KEY=<ELASTIC_API_KEY> && \
cp ./otel_samples/managed_otlp/logs_metrics_traces.yml ./otel.yml && \
mkdir -p ./data/otelcol && \
sed -i "s#\${env:STORAGE_DIR}#${PWD}/data/otelcol#g" ./otel.yml && \
sed -i "s#\${env:ELASTIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT}#${ELASTIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT}#g" ./otel.yml && \
sed -i "s#\${env:ELASTIC_API_KEY}#${ELASTIC_API_KEY}#g" ./otel.yml
		
    ELASTIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT=<ELASTIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT> && \
ELASTIC_API_KEY=<ELASTIC_API_KEY> && \
cp ./otel_samples/managed_otlp/logs_metrics_traces.yml ./otel.yml && \
mkdir -p ./data/otelcol && \
sed -i '' "s#\${env:STORAGE_DIR}#${PWD}/data/otelcol#g" ./otel.yml && \
sed -i '' "s#\${env:ELASTIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT}#${ELASTIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT}#g" ./otel.yml && \
sed -i '' "s#\${env:ELASTIC_API_KEY}#${ELASTIC_API_KEY}#g" ./otel.yml
		
    Remove-Item -Path .\otel.yml -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
Copy-Item .\otel_samples\managed_otlp\logs_metrics_traces.yml .\otel.yml
New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force -Path .\data\otelcol | Out-Null

$content = Get-Content .\otel.yml
$content = $content -replace '\${env:STORAGE_DIR}', "$PWD\data\otelcol"
$content = $content -replace '\${env:ELASTIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT}', "<ELASTIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT>"
$content = $content -replace '\${env:ELASTIC_API_KEY}', "<ELASTIC_API_KEY>"
$content | Set-Content .\otel.yml

  3. Run the Elastic Agent

    Run the following command to run the Elastic Agent.

    sudo ./otelcol --config otel.yml
		
    .\elastic-agent.exe otel --config otel.yml
    Note

    The Collector opens ports 4317 and 4318 to receive application data from locally running OTel SDKs without authentication. This allows the SDKs to send data without any further configuration needed as they use this endpoint by default.

  4. (Optional) Instrument your applications

    To collect telemetry from applications and use the Elastic Agent as a gateway, instrument your target applications following the setup instructions:

    Configure your SDKs to send the data to the local Elastic Agent using OTLP/gRPC (http://localhost:4317) or OTLP/HTTP (http://localhost:4318).

  5. Explore your data

    Go to Kibana and select Dashboards to explore your newly collected data.

The following issues might occur.

The following error is due to an improperly formatted API key:

Exporting failed. Dropping data.
{"kind": "exporter", "data_type": }
"Unauthenticated desc = ApiKey prefix not found"

Format your API key as "Authorization": "ApiKey <api-key-value-here>" or "Authorization=ApiKey <api-key>" depending on whether you're using a Collector or SDK.

The managed endpoint has per-project rate limits in place. If you reach this limit, contact our support team.