Documentation Grafana Cloud Instrument and send data Fleet Management Create a pipeline

Create and assign a configuration pipeline in Fleet Management

Grafana Fleet Management is a Grafana Cloud feature that helps you configure and manage collector instances at scale. After you onboard your collectors to the service, you can use the Fleet Management interface to configure them remotely.

Before you begin

To create configuration pipelines in Fleet Management, you should:

• Have a Grafana Cloud account.
• Have administrator privileges and the ability to create and edit access policies.
• Update Grafana Alloy to the most current version. Fleet Management must be used with Alloy collectors.
• Understand the key terms and concepts of Fleet Management and how the service works.
• Decide the appropriate configuration method for your observability setup.
  • If you want to configure your collectors fully remotely, you can move the contents of local configuration files to configuration pipelines in Fleet Management and add the remotecfg block to the empty local configuration files. This method gives you maximum control over which configurations are active and in use.
  • If you want to continue configuring some parts of your collectors locally, add the remotecfg block to the end of each local configuration file. You can create supplemental configuration pipelines in Fleet Management that run in parallel with the local configuration. Although they are a central feature of Fleet Management, configuration pipelines are optional. You can choose to configure your collectors locally and use Fleet Management only to monitor their health and resource usage.

Create a new configuration pipeline

With configuration pipelines, you can control collector behavior remotely and at scale. Configuration pipelines are made up of a unique name, a content body, and matching attributes.

Define the configuration pipeline

1. In your Grafana Cloud instance, click Connections > Collector > Fleet Management and then switch to the Remote configuration tab.

2. Click Create configuration pipeline.

3. Enter a unique name for the pipeline.

4. Insert a configuration code snippet. You can create your own using Alloy configuration syntax or select one of the snippets for Grafana Cloud integrations.

5. Click Test configuration pipeline to validate the configuration syntax. The pipeline editor provides real-time feedback on the syntactic validity of the configuration code.

6. Click Next to assign the configuration pipeline to collectors or click Save to save an incomplete pipeline.

Assign the configuration pipeline

Configuration pipelines are incomplete until you add matching attributes that assign them to collectors.

1. Click Next on the Define a configuration pipeline page.

2. Use the dropdown menus to create a matching attribute. The Collector list updates in real time to show you which collectors have been assigned the configuration pipeline.

3. Continue adding matching attributes as needed. GetConfig polling requests to the API can accept a maximum of 15 attributes.

4. Click Save to activate the configuration pipeline and return to the Configuration pipeline list.

5. Activate or deactivate a configuration pipeline with a click of the Active switch.