In this paper, the adaptive event-based control approach is applied to study leader-following consensus of multi-agent systems with linear dynamic models. Adaptive event-based controller and triggering function for each agent are designed, where the adaptive function is only dependent on its own event time instants. A sufficient condition on consensus is proposed, which shows that the adaptive event-based method presented in this paper not only can reduce the communication among neighboring agents, but also can determine the event time instants for each agent without using the global information. Furthermore, the Zeno-behavior for the concerned closed-loop system is excluded. Finally, an example is presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the obtained theoretical results.