Log Insight 3.0 Agents: New Features

In addition to typical bug fixing, the Log Insight 3.0 agents come with a variety of new features and a couple of important changes. In this post, I will highlight what is new.
li-agent

Important Changes

Let me start with the important changes first. Two things should be noted about the Log Insight 3.0 agents:

  • Ubuntu 10.04 support is dropped given that version is now end of life
  • New installs — upgrades are not impacted — of the agent will come with no default collection — read on to learn why

New Features

Two new features have been added to the agent:

  • SSL support: For both cfapi and syslog
  • Agent parsers: Logs can now be parsed client-side making field extraction easier and more performant

I plan to cover the new features in-depth in future posts. In addition to agent-side features, two new server-side features that support agents have been added:

  • Agent groups: You can now assign server-side agent configuration based on filters
  • Content Pack agent groups: You can now save agent groups to content packs

I plan to cover the server-side features in-depth in future posts as well.

How to Upgrade

Upgrading the agent is done client-side and can be automated or even put through a configuration management tool. For the Windows agent, the install process is the same as the upgrade process — while the steps are the same, the agent configuration is not modified — meaning you just install the MSI from the GUI or through CLI flags. For the Linux agent, standard upgrade flags are used for the RPM and DEB packages while the BIN package requires some manual steps as listed in the official documentation. For more information, see the official documentation.

Summary

The Log Insight 3.0 agents have some really cool new features including SSL support and parsers. The server-side capabilities have been enhanced as well to better support agents with agent groups and content pack enhancements. In my next few posts, I will cover the new features in-depth. Are you running the Log Insight 3.0 agents yet?

© 2015, Steve Flanders. All rights reserved.

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