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Grafana Cloud

Get started with Fleet Management and Grafana Alloy

Using the following guide, you’ll install a new instance of Grafana Alloy with Fleet Management enabled. After Alloy is up and running, you’ll see your new collector in your Fleet Management Inventory, where you can monitor and remotely configure it. If you’d like to try Fleet Management with existing collectors, refer to Collector onboarding.

Before you begin

Before you get started with Fleet Management, make sure you have:

  • A Grafana Cloud account. To create an account, refer to Grafana Cloud.
  • Administrator privileges for Grafana Cloud or the Collector application and the ability to create and edit access policies.
  • Access to the host, virtual machine, or cluster where the collector runs.
  • Permission to set environment variables where the collector runs.
  • An understanding of the key terms and concepts of Fleet Management and how the service works.

Install Alloy

Install a new Alloy instance and make it discoverable in Fleet Management.

  1. In your Grafana Cloud stack, click Connections > Collector Setup in the left-side menu.
  2. On the Install tab, choose Alloy.
  3. Select the platform of your host.
  4. Follow the on-screen instructions to complete your installation. Make sure the Enable Remote Configuration switch is on. The installation scripts install and start Alloy and create an Alloy configuration file with a remotecfg block.

Your new Alloy collector is up and running, and it’s registered with Fleet Management.

View your Alloy collector in Fleet Management

After your Alloy installation is successful, go to the Fleet Management interface to see your collector at work.

  1. From the same Configure page in Grafana Cloud, click the Fleet Management -> button. You are routed to your Fleet Management Inventory.
  2. On the Inventory tab, find your collector in the Collector list.
  3. Check the operational status of your collector by looking in the Status column. A green checkmark means your collector is working properly.
  4. Click your collector’s ID to bring up the details view. The screen defaults to the Health tab. Within a few minutes, you can see your collector’s health statistics as its configured components begin to process telemetry.
  5. Switch to the Logs tab in the details view to see your collector’s internal logs. You can search for specific log messages.
  6. Close the details view and switch to the Remote configuration tab in Fleet Management. Here you can see the auto-generated configuration pipelines, beginning with self_monitoring_, that are assigned to your collector.
  7. Click the edit icon for one of these pipelines to see its contents and the matching attributes it uses.
  8. Click Cancel to return to the Remote configuration tab.
  9. Switch to the Overview tab. You see a dashboard showing the status of your new fleet.

Next steps

You installed a new Alloy collector, registered it with Fleet Management, and explored the Fleet Management interface. If you’re ready to extend your fleet, refer to onboarding existing collectors and creating configuration pipelines.