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Grafana Alloy is the new name for our distribution of the OTel collector. Grafana Agent has been deprecated and is in Long-Term Support (LTS) through October 31, 2025. Grafana Agent will reach an End-of-Life (EOL) on November 1, 2025. Read more about why we recommend migrating to Grafana Alloy.

Important: This documentation is about an older version. It's relevant only to the release noted, many of the features and functions have been updated or replaced. Please view the current version.

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Install Grafana Agent Operator with Helm

In this guide, you’ll learn how to deploy Grafana Agent Operator into your Kubernetes cluster using the grafana-agent-operator Helm chart. To learn how to deploy Agent Operator without using Helm, see Install Grafana Agent Operator.

Note: If you are shipping your data to Grafana Cloud, use Kubernetes Monitoring to set up Agent Operator. Kubernetes Monitoring provides a simplified approach and preconfigured dashboards and alerts.

Before you begin

To deploy Agent Operator with Helm, make sure that you have the following:

  • A Kubernetes cluster
  • The kubectl command-line client installed and configured on your machine
  • The helm command-line client installed and configured on your machine

Note: Agent Operator is currently in beta and its custom resources are subject to change.

Install the Agent Operator Helm Chart

In this section, you’ll install the grafana-agent-operator Helm chart into your Kubernetes cluster. This will install the latest version of Agent Operator and its Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs). The chart configures Operator to maintain a Service that lets you scrape kubelets using a ServiceMonitor.

To install the Agent Operator Helm chart:

  1. Add and update the grafana Helm chart repo:

    bash 
    helm repo add grafana https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo update

  2. Install the chart, replacing my-release with your release name:

    bash 
    helm install my-release grafana/grafana-agent-operator

    If you want to modify the default parameters, you can create a values.yaml file and pass it to helm install:

    bash 
    helm install my-release grafana/grafana-agent-operator -f values.yaml

    If you want to deploy Agent Operator into a namespace other than default, use the -n flag:

    bash 
    helm install my-release grafana/grafana-agent-operator -f values.yaml -n my-namespace

    You can find a list of configurable template parameters in the Helm chart repository.

  3. Once you’ve successfully deployed the Helm release, confirm that Agent Operator is up and running:

    bash 
    kubectl get pod
kubectl get svc

    You should see an Agent Operator Pod in RUNNING state, and a kubelet service. Depending on your setup, this could take a moment.

Deploy the Grafana Agent Operator resources

Agent Operator is now up and running. Next, you need to install a Grafana Agent for Agent Operator to run for you. To do so, follow the instructions in the Deploy the Grafana Agent Operator resources topic. To learn more about the custom resources Agent Operator provides and their hierarchy, see Grafana Agent Operator architecture.