Get started with Fleet Management and OpenTelemetry Collector

Using the following guide, you’ll run an OpenTelemetry Collector with the Open Agent Management Protocol (OpAMP) Supervisor and register it with Fleet Management. After the Collector is up and running, you’ll see it in your Fleet Management Inventory, where you can monitor and remotely configure it. If you want to use Fleet Management with Grafana Alloy instead, refer to Get started with Fleet Management and Grafana Alloy.

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 the OpenTelemetry Collector and OpAMP Supervisor

Install a new Collector instance and configure a Supervisor to enable remote management.

In your Grafana Cloud stack, click Connections > Collector Setup in the left-side menu.
On the Install tab, choose OpenTelemetry.
Select the platform of your host.
Follow the on-screen instructions to complete your installation. Make sure to install the otelcol-contrib distribution of the Collector so that the OpAMP extension is included.

Your OpenTelemetry Collector is up and running, and it’s registered with Fleet Management.

View your OpenTelemetry Collector in Fleet Management

After the OpAMP Supervisor starts successfully, go to the Fleet Management interface to see your Collector at work.

In your Grafana Cloud stack, click Connections > Fleet Management.
On the Inventory tab, find your Collector in the Collector list.
Check the operational status of your Collector by looking in the Status column. A green checkmark means your Collector is working properly.
Click your Collector’s ID to bring up the details view. The screen defaults to the Health tab.
Close the details view and switch to the Remote configuration tab in Fleet Management. Here you can see the auto-generated OpenTelemetry configuration pipeline, self_monitoring_otelcol, that is assigned to your Collector.
Click the edit icon for the pipeline to see its contents and the matching attributes it uses.
Click Cancel to return to the Remote configuration tab.
Switch to the Overview tab. You see a dashboard showing the status of your new fleet.

Next steps

You ran OpenTelemetry Collector with the OpAMP Supervisor, 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.