Manage your OpenTelemetry Collectors with Fleet Management in Grafana Cloud

If you’ve built your telemetry pipelines around OpenTelemetry Collectors, you’ve already invested in a collector distribution, YAML configuration, and a deployment model that fits your infrastructure. As that deployment grows, managing it means keeping shared configuration consistent, accommodating different workloads, and understanding whether your collectors are healthy.

Fleet Management in Grafana Cloud brings those tasks together in one place. With support for the Open Agent Management Protocol (OpAMP) now generally available, you can bring supported OpenTelemetry Collector distributions into Fleet Management while continuing to use the OTel configuration language and components you already know.

We started with Grafana Alloy, Grafana’s distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector. OpAMP support extends that management workflow to organizations running upstream OTel Collector distributions, so you can adopt centralized management without first migrating to Alloy.

Keep your OTel configuration, manage it across your fleet

For a platform team supporting multiple services or environments, collector configuration often includes both shared policies and workload-specific requirements. You might apply common processing across your fleet while enabling additional collection pipelines only for particular teams, services, or environments.

Fleet Management lets you define those pipelines in OTel YAML and match them to the collectors that should run them. You can update a shared pipeline centrally and apply it across the matching collectors, reducing the work of maintaining configuration separately for each deployment.

For teams using infrastructure as code, Terraform support brings this workflow into your existing processes. You can create pipelines with YAML configuration and register active collectors with Fleet Management, making configuration and enrollment part of a repeatable, version-controlled workflow.

You also get visibility into the collectors running those pipelines. When you enroll an OTel Collector, Fleet Management automatically configures it to send self-monitoring metrics, logs, and traces to Grafana Cloud, regardless of its operating system or deployment mode. For collectors running outside Kubernetes, we also attach a host monitoring pipeline so you can investigate the underlying infrastructure alongside the collector.

These monitoring pipelines remain under your control. Like any other pipeline, you can modify them, turn them off, or send their data to a different backend.

Making OTel configuration work across multiple pipelines

Managing OTel Collectors centrally requires more than accepting YAML. A collector may receive several Fleet Management pipelines alongside its local configuration, and those pieces need to work together as one effective configuration.

This differs from how Alloy handles configuration. Alloy components are defined in blocks and connected by references to their exports. OTel Collectors define components at the top level of the configuration and reference them from one or more telemetry pipelines.

Alloy also keeps local and remote configuration separate. OTel Collectors combine local and remote configuration into one effective configuration. When multiple sources define a component with the same name, one definition can override another, changing how the resulting pipelines behave.

That creates a practical challenge for reusable configuration. Two independently written pipelines might use the same component name, even though each expects that component to behave differently. Teams shouldn’t have to coordinate every component name across all their Fleet Management pipelines to use them together.

To address this, Fleet Management post-processes the remote configuration with a merge algorithm. It adds the Fleet Management pipeline name to OTel pipeline and component identifiers and updates their references accordingly. When multiple sources define components with the same type and configuration, it deduplicates them.

This lets you manage remote pipelines as separate, reusable pieces while Fleet Management handles combining them for the collector. You can organize configuration around what each pipeline does and where it belongs, without manually assembling a separate configuration file for every combination of pipelines.

Use the deployment pattern that fits your infrastructure

Configuration is only one part of managing an OTel deployment. Where you run your collectors, and how telemetry flows, also affects how you apply shared processing and maintain your fleet.

Fleet Management works across collector deployment patterns. For organizations managing a large or mixed fleet, one option worth considering is the gateway pattern.

Separate local collection from shared processing

The gateway pattern separates collection into two layers. Edge collectors gather telemetry from services, pods, and nodes, then send it to gateway collectors. The gateways apply shared processing before forwarding telemetry to a backend.

For example, you might add team labels to metrics, tail-sample traces, or filter logs at the gateway. Keeping these policies in the gateway layer means you can manage shared processing without putting the same logic on every edge collector.

Fleet Management lets you target configuration to each collector’s role: collection pipelines for the edge and shared processing pipelines for the gateways. This gives you a way to manage both layers centrally while keeping their responsibilities distinct.

Introduce OTel gateways into a mixed fleet

Your edge agents and gateways don’t have to use the same software. If you already run software such as Fluent Bit or Telegraf, you can keep those agents at the edge and send telemetry to OTel gateways using compatible protocols.

You can then use Fleet Management to manage the supported OTel gateways and their shared processing configuration. This provides an adoption path for teams that want to introduce OpenTelemetry without replacing every existing agent at once.

The gateway pattern isn’t required for Fleet Management. Whether your collectors send directly to a backend or process telemetry through a gateway layer, OpAMP support lets you bring supported OTel Collectors into a common management workflow.

Bring your OTel fleet into Fleet Management

You can adopt centralized collector management while retaining your OTel distributions, YAML pipelines, and deployment model. Fleet Management brings configuration targeting and collector health into Grafana Cloud, with Terraform support for teams that want to manage the workflow as code.

To get started, enroll an OTel Collector, assign it a YAML pipeline, and view its health. From there, you can extend the same workflow across the collectors and environments you already operate.

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