Caution
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.
Configure Grafana Agent Flow on Kubernetes
This page describes how to apply a new configuration to Grafana Agent Flow when running on Kubernetes with the Helm chart. It assumes that:
- You have installed Grafana Agent Flow on Kubernetes using the Helm chart.
- You already have a new Grafana Agent Flow configuration that you want to apply to your Helm chart installation.
If instead you’re looking for help in configuring Grafana Agent Flow to perform a specific task, consult the following guides instead:
- Collect and forward Prometheus metrics,
- Collect OpenTelemetry data,
- or the tasks section for all the remaining configuration guides.
Configure the Helm chart
To modify Grafana Agent Flow’s Helm chart configuration, perform the following steps:
Create a local
values.yaml
file with a new Helm chart configuration.You can use your own copy of the values file or download a copy of the default values.yaml.
Make changes to your
values.yaml
to customize settings for the Helm chart.Refer to the inline documentation in the default values.yaml for more information about each option.
Run the following command in a terminal to upgrade your Grafana Agent Flow installation:
helm upgrade --namespace <NAMESPACE> <RELEASE_NAME> grafana/grafana-agent -f <VALUES_PATH>
Replace the following:
<NAMESPACE>
: The namespace you used for your Grafana Agent Flow installation.<RELEASE_NAME>
: The name you used for your Grafana Agent Flow installation.<VALUES_PATH>
: The path to your copy ofvalues.yaml
to use.
Kustomize considerations
If you are using Kustomize to inflate and install the Helm chart, be careful
when using a configMapGenerator
to generate the ConfigMap containing the
configuration. By default, the generator appends a hash to the name and patches
the resource mentioning it, triggering a rolling update.
This behavior is undesirable for Grafana Agent Flow because the startup time can be significant, for example, when your deployment has a large metrics Write-Ahead Log. You can use the Helm chart sidecar container to watch the ConfigMap and trigger a dynamic reload.
The following is an example snippet of a kustomization
that disables this behavior:
configMapGenerator:
- name: grafana-agent
files:
- config.river
options:
disableNameSuffixHash: true
Configure the Grafana Agent Flow
This section describes how to modify the Grafana Agent Flow configuration, which is stored in a ConfigMap in the Kubernetes cluster. There are two methods to perform this task.
Method 1: Modify the configuration in the values.yaml file
Use this method if you prefer to embed your Grafana Agent Flow configuration in the Helm chart’s values.yaml
file.
Modify the configuration file contents directly in the
values.yaml
file:agent: mode: "flow" configMap: content: |- // Write your Agent config here: logging { level = "info" format = "logfmt" }
Run the following command in a terminal to upgrade your Grafana Agent Flow installation:
helm upgrade --namespace <NAMESPACE> <RELEASE_NAME> grafana/grafana-agent -f <VALUES_PATH>
Replace the following:
<NAMESPACE>
: The namespace you used for your Grafana Agent Flow installation.<RELEASE_NAME>
: The name you used for your Grafana Agent Flow installation.<VALUES_PATH>
: The path to your copy ofvalues.yaml
to use.
Method 2: Create a separate ConfigMap from a file
Use this method if you prefer to write your Grafana Agent Flow configuration in a separate file.
Write your configuration to a file, for example,
config.river
.// Write your Agent config here: logging { level = "info" format = "logfmt" }
Create a ConfigMap called
agent-config
from the above file:kubectl create configmap --namespace <NAMESPACE> agent-config "--from-file=config.river=./config.river"
Replace the following:
<NAMESPACE>
: The namespace you used for your Grafana Agent Flow installation.
Modify Helm Chart’s configuration in your
values.yaml
to use the existing ConfigMap:agent: mode: "flow" configMap: create: false name: agent-config key: config.river
Run the following command in a terminal to upgrade your Grafana Agent Flow installation:
helm upgrade --namespace <NAMESPACE> <RELEASE_NAME> grafana/grafana-agent -f <VALUES_PATH>
Replace the following:
<NAMESPACE>
: The namespace you used for your Grafana Agent Flow installation.<RELEASE_NAME>
: The name you used for your Grafana Agent Flow installation.<VALUES_PATH>
: The path to your copy ofvalues.yaml
to use.