What is the Grafana Agent?

The Grafana Agent is a piece of software – based on remote_write from Prometheus – that you can run in the host where you have your application. This software gathers metrics from your host and its services and sends them to the Grafana Cloud service.

Important Note

To learn more about the remote_write functionality in Prometheus, please go to https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/remote_write/.

Unlike Prometheus, the Grafana Agent just implements remote_write, leaving all other Prometheus features aside. In particular, the Grafana Agent delivers remote_write, services discovery, and relabeling rules. This approach saves a lot of memory. Typically, you can expect a saving of 40 percent compared with the Prometheus alternative.

On the other hand, the Grafana Cloud service brings you ready-to-use dashboards, where you can view all the metrics exported by the Grafana Agent.

So, the Grafana Agent makes it easy to collect and display...