Important
Agent Control and New Relic Control are generally available for Kubernetes. Support for Linux and Windows hosts is in public preview program, pursuant to our pre-release policies.
Overview
Agent Control provides a single, unified platform for managing a wide variety of New Relic and OpenTelemetry agents across your fleets. By centralizing management, you can deploy, configure, and update your instrumentation with ease.
While Agent Control is designed to support both Kubernetes and host-based environments, support for specific agent types varies. The following table provides a comprehensive overview of which agents can be managed by Agent Control and their support status across environments.
Current support
| Agent type | Kubernetes support | Linux host support | Windows host support |
|---|---|---|---|
| New Relic infrastructure agent | ✅ Yes | Public Preview | Public Preview |
| New Relic OpenTelemetry Collector (NRDOT) | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | ⚠️ Experimental |
| Fluent Bit | ✅ Yes | 🚫 No | 🚫 No |
| New Relic Prometheus agent | ✅ Yes | 🚫 No | 🚫 No |
| New Relic eBPF agent | ✅ Yes | ⚠️ Experimental | 🚫 No |
| APM agents (.NET, Java, Node, Python, Ruby) | 🚫 No | 🚫 No | 🚫 No |
Important
Agent-specific permissions: Agent Control is designed to provide you with flexible permissions management. While Agent Control itself requires a certain level of access to function, the permissions it grants to individual agents are tailored to their specific needs. Below, you can find a breakdown of the permissions required for each agent type.
Required Permissions per agent type
| Agent Type | Key Permissions Required | Environment |
|---|---|---|
| New Relic infrastructure agent | Host-level access for system metrics and Kubernetes API access for cluster data. | Kubernetes / host-based |
| New Relic OpenTelemetry Collector (NRDOT) | Permissions depend on specific receivers and exporters. Often requires Kubernetes API access for service discovery. | Kubernetes / host-based |
| Fluent Bit | Read access to pod and container logs. | Kubernetes |
| New Relic Prometheus agent | Permissions to discover and access service endpoints within the cluster for scraping metrics. | Kubernetes |
| New Relic eBPF agent | Elevated privileges (for example, CAP_SYS_ADMIN) to load eBPF programs on the host kernel. | Kubernetes, Linux hosts (experimental) |
| APM agents (.NET, Java, Node, Python, Ruby) | Not currently supported by Agent Control. | N/A |
NRDOT on Windows hosts is experimental
The New Relic OpenTelemetry Collector (NRDOT) on Windows is available but not officially tested or documented by the NRDOT team. The default bundled configuration is designed for Linux and may produce warnings or errors on Windows (for example, from filelogreceiver paths). No default configuration is bundled for Windows — you must supply your own collector configuration. Use NRDOT on Windows only in non-critical or testing environments until full Windows support is released.
eBPF on Linux hosts is experimental
The New Relic eBPF agent requires kernel-level dependencies (such as linux-headers matching the running kernel version) that Agent Control cannot automatically resolve on Linux hosts. If these dependencies are missing or mismatched, deployment may fail without a clear error. eBPF support on Linux hosts is available for Kubernetes environments only in production. Use eBPF on Linux hosts only in non-critical or testing environments.
eBPF is not supported on Windows hosts.