Easily control observability collectors at scale with Fleet Management in Grafana Cloud

Managing observability workloads can quickly overwhelm even the most experienced admin.

Maybe you’re dealing with multiple departments, each needing its own collector configurations and pipelines. Every time you have to run a test or roll out a change, the process is cumbersome and introduces risk.

Or perhaps you’re responsible for tracking hundreds of collectors across different environments and regions. In a scenario like this, troubleshooting individual issues feels nearly impossible.

Whether you’re dealing with complex configurations, rising costs, or just trying to keep tabs on every collector, you need everything in one place to make sense of it all. That’s why we’re excited to announce the Public Preview of Fleet Management in Grafana Cloud—a powerful new way to monitor and manage observability collectors efficiently, regardless of scale.

Fleet Management is designed for teams looking to manage hundreds or thousands of collectors efficiently, so they can remotely configure, activate, or deactivate telemetry pipelines on demand. With Fleet Management, you can roll out configurations remotely, monitor collector health across all deployments, and control cost simply by activating or deactivating pipelines as needed.

Why Fleet Management?

Fleet Management is built to tackle the complexity of scaling collector management:

• Streamlined configuration management. With a central control hub, you can easily manage configurations across all collectors. Deploy targeted pipelines, fine-tune individual configurations, and cut down on overhead.
• Comprehensive Collector Insights. Get complete visibility into your collector fleet. Monitor metrics, logs, and applied configurations for each collector, making it faster to identify and resolve issues.
• Optimize data collection and costs. Tailor data collection pipelines to match specific use cases. Turn data streams on and off as needed to optimize your costs and reduce data overload.

Management of observability collectors at any scale—whether dozens, hundreds, or thousands—is now easier than ever with Fleet Management, starting with support for the Grafana Alloy collector.

How Fleet Management solves your data collection pain points

Fleet Management was designed to be flexible yet powerful, with features that make managing collectors easier and more efficient:

• API Support for as-code automation: Seamlessly integrate Fleet Management into your automation workflows. Use the Collector API for CRUD operations and bulk management of collectors, and the Pipeline API for fine-grained control over configuration creation and deployment.
• Dynamic variables and secure credentials: Reference system environment variables in configurations so collection templates remain flexible. For enhanced security, Fleet Management also integrates with HashiCorp Vault via an Alloy Collector module, so you can securely retrieve and manage sensitive credentials.
• No more monolithic configuration: Traditional configurations often rely on large, complex files. Fleet management replaces these with smaller, modular pipelines, making configurations reusable and easier to manage. This approach provides fine-grained control over which pipelines are activated, enabling on-demand collection for specialized use cases like continuous profiling or collecting debug logs.
• Bulk editing and attribute management: With bulk-editing options, you can assign and update custom attributes for collectors on the fly, even after installation.

Getting started

Fleet Management is available to Grafana Cloud Admins in the Collector section under Connections in the Grafana UI. To get started, you’ll need to install a new instance of Grafana Alloy enabled with Fleet Management. Once it’s up and running, you’ll see your new collector in Fleet Management’s inventory, where you can monitor and remotely configure it.

Follow these steps to set up a new collector for remote configuration, or refer to this guide to onboard existing collector.

Note: Currently, Fleet Management supports Grafana Alloy, our open source distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector, fully compatible with the OTLP protocol and featuring native pipelines for OTel and Prometheus. As leading contributors to the Open Agent Management Protocol (OpAMP) project, we hope to extend support to traditional OTel Collectors in the future.

Try Fleet Management today

We’re excited to bring you Fleet Management in Public Preview, available across all Grafana Cloud stacks. Enable Fleet Management for your Alloy collectors today and experience the benefits of seamless remote configuration. Our team would love to hear from you—reach out with any questions, feedback, or requests for assistance here.

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