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One component of Chronosphere Telemetry Pipeline is the agent that powers each pipeline. Chronosphere maintains two different versions of this agent that are built from distinct container images. You can set the image type for this pipeline agent when you create a new pipeline, or change the image type when you upgrade an existing pipeline. The agent image that you choose doesn’t affect the features available to that pipeline. All plugins, parsers, processing rules, and configuration options are compatible with all agent image types. The following pipeline agent image types are available:
  • Red Hat UBI (default)
  • Distroless

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Red Hat UBI

The Red Hat UBI pipeline agent is based on the Red Hat Universal Base Image, which is itself based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This is the default agent image in Telemetry Pipeline. Pipelines that use the Red Hat UBI agent image have access to several utilities bundled with the Red Hat-supplied container image, including debugging tools, which makes this agent image ideal for development environments. However, the Red Hat UBI agent image has more package dependencies than the distroless agent image, which means it might not be suitable in environments with strict security requirements.

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Distroless

The distroless pipeline agent is based on the distroless container image published by Google, which is itself based on Debian. The distroless agent image has fewer package dependencies than the Red Hat UBI agent image, which reduces the risk of underlying security vulnerabilities and makes it ideal for production environments. However, pipelines that use the distroless agent image are harder to debug than pipelines that use the Red Hat UBI agent image.