[[monitoring-with-ea]]
== Monitoring {ls} with {agent}

You can use {agent} to collect data about {ls} and ship it to the monitoring
cluster. 
When you use {agent} collection, the monitoring agent remains
active even if the {ls} instance does not. 
Plus you have the option to manage all of your monitoring agents from a central location in {fleet}.

{agent} gives you a single, unified way to add monitoring for logs, metrics, and other
types of data to a host. Each agent has a single policy you can update to add
integrations for new data sources, security protections, and more.

You can use {agent} to collect {ls} monitoring data on:

* <<dashboard-monitoring-with-elastic-agent,{ecloud} or self-managed dashboards>>. +
{agent} collects
monitoring data from your {ls} instance, sends it directly to your monitoring
cluster, and shows the data in {ls} dashboards.
{ls} dashboards include an extended range of metrics, including plugin
drilldowns, and plugin specific dashboards for the dissect filter, the grok filter, and the elasticsearch output.
* <<serverless-monitoring-with-elastic-agent,{ecloud} dashboards (serverless)>>. +
{agent} collects
monitoring data from your {ls} instance, sends it to 
https://docs.elastic.co/serverless[Elastic serverless], 
and shows the data in {ls} dashboards in https://docs.elastic.co/serverless/observability/what-is-observability-serverless[Elastic Observability].
{ls} dashboards include an extended range of metrics, including plugin
drilldowns, and plugin specific dashboards for the dissect filter, the grok filter, and the elasticsearch output.
* <<monitoring-with-elastic-agent,{stack} monitoring>>. +
Use the Elastic Stack monitoring features to gain insight into the health of {ls} instances running in your environment.

include::monitoring-ea-dashboards.asciidoc[]
include::monitoring-ea-serverless.asciidoc[]
include::monitoring-ea.asciidoc[]