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Caution

Grafana Alloy is the new name for our distribution of the OTel collector. Grafana Agent has been deprecated and is in Long-Term Support (LTS) through October 31, 2025. Grafana Agent will reach an End-of-Life (EOL) on November 1, 2025. Read more about why we recommend migrating to Grafana Alloy .
DocumentationGrafana AgentFlow modeGet startedInstallAnsible
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Install or uninstall Grafana Agent Flow using Ansible

You can use Ansible to install and manage Grafana Agent Flow on Linux hosts.

Before you begin

  • These steps assume you already have a working Ansible setup and a pre-existing inventory.
  • You can add the tasks below to any new or existing role.

Steps

To add Grafana Agent Flow to a host:

  1. Create a file named grafana-agent.yml and add the following:

    yaml 
    - name: Install Grafana Agent Flow
  hosts: all
  become: true
  tasks:
    - name: Install Grafana Agent Flow
      ansible.builtin.include_role:
        name: grafana.grafana.grafana_agent
      vars:
        grafana_agent_mode: flow
        # Destination file name
        grafana_agent_config_filename: config.river
        # Local file to copy
        grafana_agent_provisioned_config_file:  "<path-to-config-file-on-localhost>"
        grafana_agent_flags_extra:
          server.http.listen-addr: '0.0.0.0:12345'

    Replace the following:

    • <path-to-config-file-on-localhost>: The path to the River configuration file on the Ansible Controller (Localhost).

  2. Run the Ansible playbook. Open a terminal window and run the following command from the Ansible playbook directory.

    shell 
    ansible-playbook grafana-agent.yml

Validate

To verify that the Grafana Agent Flow service on the target machine is active and running, open a terminal window and run the following command:

shell 
$ sudo systemctl status grafana-agent.service

If the service is active and running, the output should look similar to this:

grafana-agent.service - Grafana Agent
  Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/grafana-agent.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
  Active: active (running) since Wed 2022-07-20 09:56:15 UTC; 36s ago
Main PID: 3176 (agent-linux-amd)
  Tasks: 8 (limit: 515)
  Memory: 92.5M
    CPU: 380ms
  CGroup: /system.slice/grafana-agent.service
    └─3176 /usr/local/bin/agent-linux-amd64 --config.file=/etc/grafana-cloud/agent-config.yaml

Next steps