Setup and Install Agent Control

Overview

Agent Control simplifies the management of your instrumentation agents. This guide will walk you through the process of installing and uninstalling Agent Control on your Kubernetes cluster or Linux hosts using different methods.

Install Agent Control

Guided install

1. Log in to New Relic.

2. Ensure the correct account is selected.

3. In Integrations & Agents, click Install Agent Control or search for Agent Control.

   

4. Follow the steps to complete the entire installation and configuration process.

5. Download the generated configuration to your computer and run the provided command in your terminal to install Agent Control. After installation, click Continue.
6. Test the connection to confirm the installation was successful. This step may take 5-10 minutes to complete.

Note about Authentication

New Relic Control requires the use of system identities, which are non-human identities used to authenticate and establish trust between services and applications.

System identities have two different ways to authenticate. The two supported authentication flows are:

• Private key-signed JSON Web Token (JWT)
• Client credentials

During the Agent Control guided installation process, the first system identity is created using client credentials, which are included in the Helm chart's values. The credentials for this system identity expire after 12 hours. When they expire, the Agent Control Helm chart deployment will fail to authenticate with the Fleet Control service, resulting in the following error:

Error getting system identity auth token. The API endpoint returned 400: Expired client secret.

In this case, the Helm chart must be updated with new system identity credentials.

global:
  cluster: "cluster-name"
  licenseKey: "*************************"
agent-control-deployment:
  identityClientId: "L1_CLIENT_ID"
  identityClientSecret: "L1_CLIENT_SECRET"
  config:
    fleet_control:
      fleet_id: "SAMPLE_FLEET_ID"
      auth:
        organizationId: "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"
    subAgents:
      ...

Verify Installation

Now that Agent Control is installed and running, you're ready to configure and manage your agents or deploy changes to your agents using Fleet Control](/docs/new-relic-control/fleet-control/overview).

Kubernetes

1. Run the following commands to check the status of your pods:

   Agent Control installs sub-agents in a different namespace for security reasons. To verify that everything is working, check that the Agent Control pods are running in the newrelic-agent-control namespace and the sub-agent pods are running in a different one (e.g., newrelic).

$
kubectl get pods -n newrelic-agent-control    # Check Agent Control pods
$
kubectl get pods -n newrelic                  # Check sub-agents pods

2. Log in to New Relic, and go to Fleet Control.
3. Go to the Fleets page and select the fleet you chose during installation.
4. In the Entities table, confirm that your Kubernetes cluster appears in the list.
5. Verify that the instrumentation status for your cluster is healthy.

Linux

• Check the status of the newrelic-agent-control service:

  bash

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  $
  sudo systemctl status newrelic-agent-control

  If the service appears in failed or stopped state, this means the agent got installed but there's an issue preventing its normal operation. Check the agent services logs using journaltctl (or any similar Linux tool):

  bash

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  $
  journalctl -u newrelic-agent-control

  If no insights are available, check how to run the agent in debug mode to access detailed logs explaining why the service cannot be started.

• If the service is not installed, try appending --debug at the end of the install command and run it again. This will enable verbose logging for the installation script. See if the verbose output has additional context explaining the error.

• Optionally, answer yes when asked to send logs to New Relic to help troubleshooting the installation. Once submitted, logs can be accessed with the following NRQL query:

  SELECT * FROM Log WHERE hostname = `your-host-name`

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Uninstall Agent Control

Kubernetes

To uninstall Agent Control from your Kubernetes cluster, run the following commands:

$
helm list --all-namespaces

Linux hosts

$
sudo apt-get remove newrelic-agent-control

$
sudo zypper -n remove newrelic-infra

$
sudo yum remove newrelic-agent-control