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Clarify prerequisites, limitations, and troubleshooting in agent quickstart (#1813)
This PR proposes some improvements to the "Monitor hosts with Elastic Agent" quickstart guide. I added: - A prerequisite for serverless: creating an Elastic Cloud deployment if one doesn't exist - A tip for a common install issue: cleaning up old agent installations I also clarified that Docker metrics are not auto-detected on macOS due to the Docker Desktop VM (previously only logs were mentioned). These changes are based on a walkthrough of the quickstart tutorial. This PR resolves #1639
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solutions/observability/get-started/quickstart-monitor-hosts-with-elastic-agent.md

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@@ -48,6 +48,7 @@ The script also generates an {{agent}} configuration file that you can use with
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:sync: serverless
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* An {{obs-serverless}} project. To learn more, refer to [Create an Observability project](/solutions/observability/get-started/create-an-observability-project.md).
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* An Elastic deployment. If you don’t have one yet, go to [cloud.elastic.co](https://cloud.elastic.co/). Within **Hosted deployments**, select **Create hosted deployment**.
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* A user with the **Admin** role or higher—required to onboard system logs and metrics. To learn more, refer to [Assign user roles and privileges](/deploy-manage/users-roles/cloud-organization/user-roles.md#general-assign-user-roles).
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* Root privileges on the host—required to run the auto-detection script used in this quickstart.
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* The auto-detection script works on Linux and MacOS only. Support for the `lsof` command is also required if you want to detect custom log files.
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* If you’ve installed Apache or Nginx in a non-standard location, you’ll need to specify log file paths manually when you run the scan.
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* Because Docker Desktop runs in a VM, its logs are not auto-detected.
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* Because Docker Desktop runs in a VM, its host-level logs and metrics are not auto-detected.
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## Collect your data [_collect_your_data]
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You’ll run this command to download the auto-detection script, scan your system for observability data, and install {{agent}}.
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:::{tip}
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If you've previously installed {{agent}}, you may need to uninstall it first:
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`sudo elastic-agent uninstall`
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If uninstalling fails or the agent is stuck, rerun the install with the `--force` flag.
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:::
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4. Open a terminal on the host you want to scan, and run the command.
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5. Review the list of log files:
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You’ll run this command to download the auto-detection script, scan your system for observability data, and install {{agent}}.
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:::{tip}
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If you've previously installed {{agent}}, you may need to uninstall it first:
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`sudo elastic-agent uninstall`
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If uninstalling fails or the agent is stuck, rerun the install with the `--force` flag.
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:::
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5. Open a terminal on the host you want to scan, and run the command.
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6. Review the list of log files:
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