[Elastic Agent] Provide the ability for the user to set the name of their agent during installation

[nimarezainia]

Use Case: Currently the name attached to the agent is chosen by Elastic - as in derived from some other entity (i.e machine name). Often these names have no significance to the user of our product who many need to better visually differentiate. In some instances the user is operating a multi tenanted environment and would like to encode the tenant name/ID into the agent name.

Proposal: Provide a flag for the user to overwrite the given name during installation/enrollment. This name should appear in the Fleet UI.

Suggested syntax:

elastic-agent enroll --url=https:// --enrollment-token= --name=”CEO laptop”

elastic-agent install --url=https:// --enrollment-token= --name=”CEO laptop”

[jlind23]

@nimarezainia Where should this name be stored?

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/elastic-agent-control-plane (Team:Elastic-Agent-Control-Plane)

[ruflin]

Should a user also be able to change this name in Fleet through the UI / API?

[nimarezainia]

@jlind23 stored in the fleet, where today we use the machine name.

@ruflin What other attributes of the agent can be set via UI/API? aside from namespace not sure much can be changed. original intention of this for the name to be defined during installation where there is context. Ability to change the name via UI does make sense. I will add that.

[ruflin]

I don't think we have other properties yet that can be changed.

@joshdover AFAIK we already have a saved object per agent where this could be stored. Lets make sure if we also add support for tags we have a "generic" implementation meaning at least the API calls are consistent to update properties of an Elastic Agent. Where is the log level of an Elastic Agent stored?

[joshdover]

AFAIK we already have a saved object per agent where this could be stored. Lets make sure if we also add support for tags we have a "generic" implementation meaning at least the API calls are consistent to update properties of an Elastic Agent.

Correction: we no longer have a Saved Object for Agents but we do have a document in the .fleet-agents index, but the same idea applies. +1 on supporting updates to this via the PUT /api/fleet/agents/:id endpoint in Kibana.

[jlind23]

For further conversation:

• We should be ECS compliant
• We should then use this particular field https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/ecs/current/ecs-agent.html#field-agent-name

[ph]

This is similar to what we have done for tags, I'd suggest we allow a user to specify the name at enroll time this would align well with provisioning tool like jamf. If we want to add the possibility to change the name of a machine we should only allow that changes to happen on fleet.

Tasks:

• We should be able to define the name of the machine when installing via the tarball
• We should be able to define the name of the machine with the variables in the container.

[asazallesmilner]

We are having the same issue. We urgently need a way to override the hostname that is being provided by the server to elastic agent to enable connectivity. Is there any way to do that? related to support ticket 01333744

[rubal033]

I think this will solve below problem as well: https://discuss.elastic.co/t/grouping-hosts-in-infrastructure-by-custom-key-or-tags/336707

It would be good if we can use the fleet tags in infrastructure and other observability filters.

[intxgo]

Hi, as I mentioned on the ER, [Defend] is also affected

if it's implemented this custom name should also be passed to Endpoint via policy, see external issue

• https://github.com/elastic/endpoint/issues/75