Introduction to Fleet Management
Grafana Fleet Management is a Grafana Cloud feature that enables you to manage collector deployments at scale.
Streamlined configuration management. With a central control hub, you can easily manage configurations across all collectors. Create, activate, deactivate, or adjust configuration pipelines remotely without complex scripts or time-consuming change management processes, all from the Grafana Cloud interface.
Centralized health monitoring. You have complete visibility into the health of your collector fleet. View out-of-the-box dashboards that track metrics for component health, system resources, and deployment infrastructure. Connect erroring collectors with faulty configuration without leaving the application. Troubleshoot more efficiently and identify issues with individual collectors more quickly.
Cost and collection control. Tailor data collection pipelines to match specific use cases and ensure observability data stays focused on what’s most important. Turn data streams on and off as needed to optimize your costs and reduce data overload.
Key features
Fleet Management offers these key features to help teams manage large numbers of collector instances in Grafana Cloud. If you’d like to use Fleet Management in a self-managed enterprise or on-premises environment, refer to the set up instructions.
Overview
The Overview tab provides an at-a-glance dashboard of your entire fleet’s health and composition. View key metrics including total collector count, active pipelines, collector type and version distributions, operating system breakdown, resource limit usage, and fleet-wide health indicators. This centralized dashboard helps you quickly assess the overall state of your Fleet Management deployment.
Inventory
The Inventory tab is a powerful tool for managing your collectors. This list of registered collectors shows the health status, collector version, operating system, and attributes for each collector. You can change which columns are displayed in the list and how they’re ordered. Filter the list by collector type, status, or attributes or search for any of the other list parameters. Select multiple collectors at once to bulk edit remote attributes.
The Inventory tab is your organizational hub where you can keep track of collector categorization by attribute. When you manage large collector fleets without proper organization, you can face operational challenges and configuration management complexity. Custom attributes, whether remote or local, solve this problem by providing a systematic way to categorize collectors and enable remote configuration through Fleet Management.
Categorize your fleet with attributes if you want to:
- Remotely configure collectors with reusable configuration based on meaningful characteristics
- Quickly identify collector ownership when issues arise
- Filter collectors by attribute to monitor health and identify issues
- Segment collectors by environment to target configuration changes to production, staging, or development
- Enable efficient troubleshooting through organized fleet visibility
To learn more about the different types of attributes, how they work, and how you can use them, refer to the Fleet Management glossary and the Streamline your workflows page. To try out categorizing your fleet with custom remote attributes, follow the categorization learning journey.
The Inventory tab is also where you can monitor the health of your registered collectors. Check the health status of your fleet at a glance or click on any collector ID to see its details view. From here, you can see vital information about your collector, including health metrics, internal logs, alerts, and its assigned attributes and remote configuration, along with any configuration errors.
The Fleet Management service doesn’t come with out-of-the-box alerts, but it fetches user-created alerts from the Grafana Prometheus instance. Create alerts in your stack’s Prometheus Alertmanager to make them discoverable by the health status check and visible in the collector details view.
Remote configuration
The Remote configuration tab is where you can create, edit, activate, and delete configuration pipelines. Build your pipeline, test the pipeline syntax, and then add matching attributes to assign the configuration pipeline to collectors. To learn more, refer to Configuration pipelines.
You can also view, search, and edit your existing configuration pipelines and their matching attributes. When pipelines are created through external sources like GitHub or Terraform, the interface displays a Source column to help you identify the origin of each pipeline. Activate or deactivate a pipeline with a click of the switch.
If you need to view changes to configuration pipelines, use the Pipelines history view to find changes to all pipelines or click on the Pipeline history icon for a specific pipeline to see only its changes.
