v0.14.0

[rfratto]

This is release v0.14.0 of the Grafana Agent, and our biggest release to date! There's a lot to go over since the v0.13.1 release. One notable thing that doesn't get a changelog entry is the introduction of a governance team. Please welcome Matt Durham, Joe Elliott, Robert Fratto, Richard Hartmann, and Mario Rodriguez as the initial team members!

One more thing: we're also going to start marking features interchangeably as beta or experimental when we believe they are going to change. This is to help us continue iterating quickly while making it clear which things we believe are production-ready.

Upgrading

⚠️ THIS RELEASE HAS BREAKING CHANGES ⚠️

Read the migration guide for specific instructions on upgrading from older versions.

Notable changes:

This is the first release where we have changed the name of the project from Grafana Cloud Agent to Grafana Agent. The new name is for a few reasons, but I (@rfratto) like to say "Grafana Agent" is less confusing, since it was never intended to only be used by Grafana Cloud users. The README has been updated to reflect who might find the Grafana Agent useful.

With that out of the way, let's get into the biggest changes of this release:

• Thanks to the work by @mattdurham, official Windows support is now in beta! The Grafana Agent now supports being run natively as a Windows service, logs to the Windows Event Log, has a Windows isntaller, and includes windows_exporter as an integration.
• Also in beta is /-/reload, where you can tell an Agent to dynamically reload its entire config file. Paired with this is a /-/config endpoint to return the current in-memory config being used.
• More things in beta! Courtesy of @yeya24, you can now generate metrics from your spans!
• Thanks to @mattdurham, we finally support a global remote_write block! No more duplicating remote_write across both integrations and scrape configs!
• The FreeBSD build returns, as well as official support for M1 Macs!
• @joe-elliott and @mapno have been hard at work on the tracing subsystem; the Agent now supposed tail-based sampling and automatic logs and metrics based on spans!

Way too much has changed this time, so please check out the full CHANGELOG for all the details. Thank you to everyone who contributed to this release!

Installation:

Grafana Agent is currently distributed in plain binary form, Docker container images, and a Kubernetes install script. Choose whichever fits your use-case best.

Kubernetes Install Script

The following scripts will download and install two Kubernetes manifests for the Agent. The first manifest collects metrics, the second collects logs, and the final collects traces. You will be prompted for input for each manifest. The script requires curl and envsubst (GNU gettext).

NAMESPACE="default" /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/grafana/agent/v0.14.0/production/kubernetes/install.sh)" | kubectl apply -f -
NAMESPACE="default" /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/grafana/agent/v0.14.0/production/kubernetes/install-loki.sh)" | kubectl apply -f -
NAMESPACE="default" /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/grafana/agent/v0.14.0/production/kubernetes/install-tempo.sh)" | kubectl apply -f -

Docker container:

• https://hub.docker.com/r/grafana/agent

docker pull "grafana/agent:v0.14.0"

Binary

We provide precompiled binary executables for the most common operating systems. Choose from the assets below for your matching operating system. Example for the linux operating system on amd64:

# download the binary
curl -O -L "https://github.com/grafana/agent/releases/download/v0.14.0/agent-linux-amd64.zip"

# extract the binary
unzip "agent-linux-amd64.zip"

# make sure it is executable
chmod a+x "agent-linux-amd64"

agentctl

agentctl, a tool for helping you interact with the Agent, is available as a Docker image:

docker pull "grafana/agentctl:v0.14.0"

Or as a binary. Like before, choose the assets below that matches your operating system. For example, with linux on amd64:

# download the binary
curl -O -L "https://github.com/grafana/agent/releases/download/v0.14.0/agentctl-linux-amd64.zip"

# extract the binary
unzip "agentctl-linux-amd64.zip"

# make sure it is executable
chmod a+x "agentctl-linux-amd64"

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This discussion was created from the release v0.14.0.