Important: the new Agent is currently in Beta, we recommend to check out this document before starting using it.
Agent 6 is the latest major version of the Datadog Agent. The big difference between Agent 5 and Agent 6 is that Agent 6 is a complete rewrite of the core Agent in Golang. Don’t worry! We still support Python checks.
To install the Agent you can either upgrade from an older version, or start fresh with a new installation - in this case, please refer to the official documentation. If you want to go back to version 5.x, please follow the instructions about how to downgrade.
There are a number of differences between the old major version of the Agent and the new one - to see what changed, please refer to this document. The way you can configure the Agent changed too, please read this document where all the new options are detailed. The latest Agent won't have feature parity with the previous one at first, you can see the list of what's missing here.