Manage Alloy pipelines in Fleet Management
Use Grafana Assistant to manage Alloy collector pipelines with safety guardrails. You can list and inspect pipelines, validate Alloy configuration, and create or update pipelines with approval.
What you’ll achieve
- View existing pipeline status and configuration quickly.
- Validate Alloy configuration before rollout.
- Create pipelines with scoped matchers for safer targeting.
- Update disabled pipelines while preserving manual control of enable and disable actions.
Before you begin
Make sure Grafana Fleet Management is available in your Grafana Cloud stack and you can access Alloy pipeline configuration. Assistant requires Fleet Management to be installed before these tools are available.
Write operations require explicit approval in chat. Assistant prompts for approval before executing create or update operations.
Inspect existing pipelines
Start with read operations to understand current state before making changes.
List all pipelines
Get a quick status view of enabled and disabled pipelines to understand what’s running across your collectors.
List Fleet Management pipelines.
Inspect a specific pipeline
Review full configuration for one pipeline to verify settings and troubleshoot issues.
Show pipeline
abc123and include its Alloy configuration.
Open Fleet Management pages
Use navigation commands to jump into the UI when you need manual workflow access.
Open Fleet Management home.
Open the edit page for pipeline
abc123.
Validate and create pipelines
Validate early so syntax and semantic errors don’t reach rollout.
Validate Alloy configuration
Run validation against Fleet Management before create or update to catch syntax and semantic errors early.
Validate this Alloy configuration and show any line-level errors.
Create a pipeline with matchers
Provide a name, Alloy contents, and at least one matcher to scope which collectors receive the configuration.
Create a pipeline named
prod_logs_routerwith matchersenv=prodandcluster=us-east, using this Alloy configuration.
Assistant validates configuration automatically and creates new pipelines in a disabled state for review.
Update pipelines safely
Assistant enforces safety rules during write operations.
Update a disabled pipeline
Update name, configuration, or matchers for a disabled pipeline to prepare changes before rollout.
Update pipeline
abc123with this new Alloy config and matcherregion=us-west.
Handle enabled pipelines
Enabled pipelines are not updated automatically by Assistant to prevent unintended configuration changes to running collectors.
Update enabled pipeline
abc123to add matcherapp=checkout.
Assistant routes you to the edit page so you can review and apply the change manually.
Manage status manually
For safety, Assistant does not enable or disable pipelines directly to ensure deliberate control over rollout timing.
Use the Fleet Management UI to change pipeline status after review.
Solve common collector-management problems
Use Assistant workflows to reduce rollout risk and configuration drift.
Prevent broken collector rollouts
Validate configuration before create and update so errors are caught early.
Roll out by environment safely
Use matchers like env=prod or region=us-east to scope pipeline impact.
Audit pipeline state quickly
List pipelines and inspect details to confirm what is enabled and what changed.
Optimize pipelines based on telemetry
Ask Assistant to analyze metrics and logs from your datasources to identify pipeline improvements.
Review metrics from the
prod_logs_routerpipeline and suggest configuration improvements to reduce data volume or improve performance.
Analyze dropped metrics for pipeline
abc123and recommend changes to the relabeling rules.
Assistant can correlate pipeline configuration with actual telemetry patterns to suggest optimizations like better filtering, more efficient relabeling, or adjusted scrape intervals.
