Supported agent types

Agent Control provides a single, unified platform for managing a wide variety of New Relic and OpenTelemetry agents across your fleets. By centralizing management, you can deploy, configure, and update your instrumentation with ease.

While Agent Control is designed to support both containerized and on-premise environments, support for specific agent types varies. The following table provides a comprehensive overview of which agents can be managed by Agent Control and their support status across environments.

Current support

Agent details

New Relic APM agents

APM agents instrument your applications to monitor their performance, track transactions, and provide code-level visibility. Agent Control allows you to manage these agents across your containers and hosts, ensuring consistent monitoring across your application portfolio.

Infrastructure, logging, and metrics agents

These agents are designed for collecting telemetry from your hosts, containers, and services, providing deep visibility into your entire infrastructure.

New Relic infrastructure agent

• Type: newrelic/com.newrelic.infrastructure
• Purpose: Collects system-level metrics from your hosts and containers. It also includes integrated functionality for managing other infrastructure-related components.
• Key Use Cases: Monitors CPU, memory, and network usage; collects Kubernetes cluster metrics (via kube-state-metrics); and manages event reporting (nri-kube-events).
• Permissions: Requires permissions to access host-level data and interact with the Kubernetes API for resource discovery and metric collection.
• More Info: Install the Infrastructure Agent.

New Relic Prometheus agent

• Type: newrelic/com.newrelic.prometheus
• Purpose: Scrapes Prometheus-format metrics from your services and forwards them to New Relic.
• Key Use Cases: Collects metrics from services that expose a /metrics endpoint, enabling you to use Prometheus-style monitoring within New Relic.
• Permissions: Requires permissions to discover and access service endpoints within your Kubernetes cluster to perform metric scraping.
• More Info: Prometheus Agent configuration.

Fluent Bit

• Type: newrelic/io.fluentbit
• Purpose: A lightweight and high-performance log processor and forwarder.
• Key Use Cases: Collects, filters, and routes log data from all your applications and infrastructure to New Relic.
• Permissions: Requires read access to pod and container logs within the cluster.
• More Info: Fluent Bit Log Forwarding.

New Relic eBPF agent

• Type: newrelic/com.newrelic.ebpf
• Purpose: Uses eBPF technology to provide high-resolution, deep visibility into system activity without requiring manual instrumentation.
• Key Use Cases: Observes network connections, process activity, and system calls for enhanced security and performance analysis.
• Permissions: Requires elevated privileges, such as CAP_SYS_ADMIN, to load eBPF programs on the host kernel.
• More Info: eBPF Agent.

New Relic OpenTelemetry Collector (NRDOT)

Agent Control provides first-class support for OpenTelemetry, allowing you to manage and configure your collectors and instrumentation directly.

• Type: newrelic/io.opentelemetry.collector
• Purpose: A custom distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector that gathers metrics, logs, and traces from various sources and exports them to New Relic.
• Key Use Cases: Provides a single pipeline for collecting all telemetry types from your services and infrastructure.
• Permissions: Permissions are dependent on the specific receivers and exporters configured. It often requires access to the Kubernetes API for service discovery.
• More Info: OpenTelemetry Collector documentation.

For more information about the supported agent types by Agent Control, please check out our "Agent Type Registry"

Required Permissions per agent type