Guest Agent#

Introduction#

The lambda-guest-agent (Guest Agent) is a service you can install on both Lambda Cloud on-demand instances and 1-Click Cluster (1CC) nodes. For simplicity, this documentation refers to both types of systems as virtual machines (VMs). The Guest Agent collects system metrics, such as GPU and VRAM utilization, and sends them to Lambda's backend. You can then view these metrics on the Cloud dashboard.

Note

The metrics dashboard will be generally available on the Cloud dashboard in Q2 of 2025. To request early access, submit a support ticket.

Install the Guest Agent#

To install the Guest Agent:

SSH into your VM. Replace <IP-ADDRESS> with the actual IP address of your VM:
```
ssh ubuntu@<IP-ADDRESS>
```

Download and install the Guest Agent:

curl -L https://lambdalabs-guest-agent.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/scripts/install.sh | sudo bash

Confirm that the Guest Agent is running:

sudo systemctl --no-pager status lambda-guest-agent*

You should see output similar to:

● lambda-guest-agent.service - Lambda metrics and observability agent
    Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/lambda-guest-agent.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
    Active: active (running) since Mon 2024-10-28 20:58:44 UTC; 18s ago
Main PID: 68284 (telegraf)
    Tasks: 18 (limit: 271525)
    Memory: 11.5M
    CPU: 572ms
    CGroup: /system.slice/lambda-guest-agent.service
        └─68284 /usr/local/bin/lambda/guest-agent/telegraf -config /etc/lambda/guest-agent/telegraf/telegraf.conf

● lambda-guest-agent-updater.timer - Lambda metrics and observability agent updater
    Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/lambda-guest-agent-updater.timer; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
    Active: active (waiting) since Mon 2024-10-28 20:58:44 UTC; 18s ago
Trigger: Tue 2024-11-05 10:27:09 UTC; 1 week 0 days left
Triggers: ● lambda-guest-agent-updater.service

Oct 28 20:58:44 192-222-52-58 systemd[1]: Started Lambda metrics and observability agent updater.

● lambda-guest-agent-updater.service - Lambda metrics and observability agent updater
    Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/lambda-guest-agent-updater.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
    Active: active (exited) since Mon 2024-10-28 20:58:50 UTC; 12s ago
TriggeredBy: ● lambda-guest-agent-updater.timer
Process: 68290 ExecStart=/bin/bash /usr/local/bin/lambda/guest-agent/guest-agent-update.sh (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Main PID: 68290 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
    CPU: 4.845s

Your metrics should appear on your Cloud dashboard within a few minutes.

Updating the Guest Agent#

The Guest Agent automatically updates itself every two weeks. To disable automatic updates, stop and disable the lambda-guest-agent-updater.timer systemd unit:

sudo systemctl stop lambda-guest-agent-updater.timer
sudo systemctl disable lambda-guest-agent-updater.timer

Uninstalling the Guest Agent#

To uninstall the Guest Agent, run:

sudo apt remove lambda-guest-agent

Security#

The guest agent collects and measures attributes of your system. We store these metrics in our internal metrics infrastructure that we gate behind strict authorization schemes.

The source code for guest-agent is available in our public Github mirror. We publish checksums of the release artifacts in the Releases page that you can use to verify the integrity of the downloaded artifacts.

Data privacy#

Lambda takes your data privacy seriously. When you install lambda-guest-agent, we forward your metrics to our internal metrics infrastructure. Lambda does not store any personally identifying information in our metrics backend. The only customer-specific identifier we store is a unique ID that will only be used to allow lambdalabs.com to gather your specific data once visualizations are available there. We do not store names, email addresses, street addresses, billing information, VM hostnames, or any other personally-identifying information on our metrics backend beyond what is necessary to serve your data to you.