About the Pulse Agent
The Pulse Agent is dedicated high-performance, low-signature software that provides the Pulse platform with all the metrics it needs to deliver insights and alerts for your clusters.
Security and data protection are priorities for us!
The secure Pulse agent is non-intrusive, requesting monitoring-only access. Pulse does not need access to your cluster to ensure stability and consistent performance. The Pulse Agent sends metrics only, and never anything more than that. Under no circumstances will Pulse ever send actual data stored on your platforms.
Please find additional details about Pulse Security and Data Protection features below.
Installing the Pulse Agent
To get started, head over to your cluster type. You can choose from the following:
- OpenSearch
- OpenSearch on Amazon OpenSearch Service
- Elasticsearch
- Elastic Cloud
- Elasticsearch on Amazon OpenSearch Service
- Elasticsearch 2.x or earlier
Next, you will choose the appropriate authentication method to ensure secure access to the system. Afterward, you will select the environment in which you'd like to deploy the Pulse Agent.
The documentation for each cluster type includes commonly-used options.
For advanced configuration and fine-tuning options, visit the Advanced Adjustments page.
To jump-start the process, we recommend using the Integration Wizard available on the Pulse homepage.
Note: Pulse Agent requires connection to the monitored services, as well as to https://pulse.support/ to send monitoring data. Make sure the machine on which the agent is installed has network access to both.
Security and Data Protection
The Pulse agent is a JVM software, and the container contains a jar with all dependencies of it. It polls your ES cluster on the standard 9200 HTTP port (round-robins on all nodes, or the managed service DNS); and pushes events to us on https://incoming.pulse.support/ (standard HTTPS). The agent ensures high availability by allowing the deployment of multiple instances. The container should run from your infrastructure. We don't want to have any sort of access to your cluster. You can run the fat jar directly, or the container as is.
Some additional notes on Pulse Security and Data Protection:
- Security and data protection: The Pulse Agent software only sends metrics and never sends any actual customer data stored. We implement encryption and other security measures to protect the transmission of data.
- Availability: The Pulse Agent has a high-availability feature - it is possible to deploy multiple instances of the agent, and it's guaranteed to have only one active agent at every point in time to reduce network traffic and avoid overloading your clusters with metrics polling.
- Performance: The agent is designed to have minimal impact on the performance of your infrastructure.
- Vulnerability scanning: Both the software itself, and the container it is distributed in, go through periodic scanning for vulnerabilities via Snyk and Amazon Container Scanning on ECR, and any vulnerabilities are fixed as soon as a fix is available.