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Get started with system metrics

Learn how to onboard your system metrics data quickly.

Required role

The Admin role or higher is required to onboard system metrics data. To learn more, refer to Assign user roles and privileges.

In this guide you'll learn how to onboard system metrics data from a machine or server, then observe the data in Elastic Observability.

To onboard system metrics data:

  1. Create a new Observability project, or open an existing one.

  2. In your Observability project, go to Infrastructure → Inventory or Hosts.

  3. In the upper-right corner, click Add data.

  4. Type System in the search bar, then select the integration to see more details about it.

  5. Click Add System.

  6. Follow the in-product steps to install the System integration and deploy an Elastic Agent. The sequence of steps varies depending on whether you have already installed an integration.

    • When configuring the System integration, make sure that Collect metrics from System instances is turned on.
    • Expand each configuration section to verify that the settings are correct for your host. For example, you may want to turn on System core metrics to get a complete view of your infrastructure.

Notice that you can also configure the integration to collect logs.

What if Elastic Agent is already running on my host?

Do not try to deploy a second Elastic Agent to the same system. You have a couple options:

  • Use the System integration to collect system logs and metrics. To do this, uninstall the standalone agent you deployed previously, then follow the in-product steps to install the System integration and deploy an Elastic Agent.
  • Configure your existing standalone agent to collect metrics. To do this, edit the deployed Elastic Agent's YAML file and add metric inputs to the configuration manually. Manual configuration is a time-consuming process. To save time, you can follow the in-product steps that describe how to deploy a standalone Elastic Agent, and use the generated configuration as source for the input configurations that you need to add to your standalone config file.

After the agent is installed and successfully streaming metrics data, go to Infrastructure → Inventory or Hosts to see a metrics-driven view of your infrastructure. To learn more, refer to View infrastructure metrics by resource type or Analyze and compare hosts.

Next steps

Now that you've added metrics and explored your data, learn how to onboard other types of data:

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