Install Network Flow Monitor agents on instances

To provide performance metrics for network flows in your Amazon workloads, Network Flow Monitor relies on agents that you install, which send the metrics to Network Flow Monitor. You install Network Flow Monitor agents on your instances, and then set the correct permissions for the agents so that they can send metrics to the Network Flow Monitor backend.

An agent is a lightweight software application that you install on your resources, such as your VPC EC2 instances. Agents send performance metrics to the Network Flow Monitor backend on an ongoing basis. Then, you can view the metrics on the Workload insights page in the Network Flow Monitor console. You can also track detailed metrics for a specific network flow, or set of flows, by creating a monitor.

The instances that you install agents on must be running supported versions and distributions of Linux. Network Flow Monitor supports agents to run only on Linux, and the Linux kernel version must be 5.8 or later. The following Linux distributions are supported. Note that agents are tested to run on the latest versions of these distributions.

You can establish a private connection between your VPC and Network Flow Monitor agents by using Amazon PrivateLink. For more information, see Using CloudWatch, CloudWatch Synthetics, and CloudWatch Network Monitoring with interface VPC endpoints.

The steps that you follow to deploy agents in your instances depend on the type of instance: VPC EC2 instances, Amazon EKS Kubernetes instances, or self-managed (non-EKS) Kubernetes instances.