sematext/agent repository overview

⁠Sematext Agent

Sematext Agent collects a plethora of metrics about hosts (CPU, memory, disk, network, processes), containers (both Docker and rkt) and orchestrator platforms and ships that to Sematext Cloud⁠. To gain deep insight into the Linux kernel, Sematext Agent relies on eBPF to implant instrumentation points (attach eBPF programs to kprobes) on kernel functions. This allows for a very efficient and powerful system exploration approach. It has auto-discovery capabilities of services deployed on physical/virtual hosts and containers, as well as a mechanism for reporting inventory info. It also collects events from different sources such as OOM notifications, container or Kubernetes events.

⁠Docker Tags

Sematext Agent uses a major version-specific tagging strategy to provide better version targeting and release management:

⁠Stable Releases

• latest-4 - Latest stable release for major version 4 (current major version)
• 4.x.y - Specific version tags (e.g., 4.0.0)

⁠Beta/Pre-releases

• beta-4 - Latest pre-release/release candidate for major version 4
• 4.x.y-rc.z - Specific pre-release tags (e.g., 4.0.0-rc.1)

⁠Architecture Support

All tags are available for both AMD64 and ARM64 architectures with automatic multi-arch manifest support.

Note: We recommend using latest-4 for production deployments to ensure you receive the latest stable features and security updates within the current major version.

⁠Capabilities

• Provides full visibility over the basic operating system metrics on your hosts. For example, you can easily spot CPU spikes and correlate them with other metric sources.
• Agnostic and unified container monitoring to gain deep visibility into your containerized deployments and orchestration platforms.
• Discovers your network topology⁠ with the eBPF-driven ultra efficient observability tracers.
• Collects a myriad of events such as Docker/Kubernetes life cycle events, package install/uninstall, OOMK or signal notifications among others.
• Inventory tracking⁠ of your whole infrastructure including packages, server details, container metadata and more.
• Process monitoring⁠ that helps out identifying top CPU or memory consumers.
• Service discovery and automated monitoring for vanilla Docker and Kubernetes workloads.

⁠Preparation

To run Sematext Docker Agent you will need a Monitoring App Token and a Logs App Token. If you don't have Monitoring and/or Logs Apps yet, you can create a Docker Monitoring and Logs Apps now⁠.

⁠Documentation

Sematext UI shows the deployment instructions. Please refer to Docker⁠ and Kubernetes⁠ installation in the Sematext Agent documentation⁠.

⁠Beta Testing

Beta releases (beta-4 tag) contain the latest features and improvements that are being prepared for the next stable release. While beta releases undergo extensive testing, they may contain experimental features. Beta releases are ideal for:

• Testing new features before they reach stable release
• Development and staging environments
• Providing feedback on upcoming releases

For production environments, we recommend using the stable latest-4 tag.