agent

agent

noun

Splunk Observability Cloud context

A software tool or component that processes and forwards software telemetry to an observability back end, such as Splunk Observability Cloud. In the context of application monitoring, agents instrument applications to collect spans, traces, logs, and metrics.

There are two types of observability agents:

• Agents that collect infrastructure telemetry, which run in the background as daemons or services
• Agents that instrument software applications by attaching to the application as packages or components

You can configure Splunk agents for application monitoring (APM), real-time user monitoring (RUM), and infrastructure monitoring using the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector.

Related terms

• Instrumentation
• Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector

For more information

• Instrument back-end applications to send spans to Splunk APM
• Instrument mobile and web applications for Splunk RUM
• Instrument serverless functions for Splunk Observability Cloud

Splunk Enterprise context

In versions 10.0 and higher of Splunk Enterprise, an agent is a Splunk Enterprise instance that is remotely configured by agent management. Additionally from this version the OTel Collector agents can be monitored. In versions lower than 10.0 of Splunk Enterprise, the agent is called deployment client.

Agents can be grouped together into 1 or more server classes.

Each agent periodically polls its agent management. If the agent management has new content for the agent's server class, it distributes that content to the polling agent.

For more information

• Agent management architecture
• Configure agents
• Deploy apps to agents