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How Fleet Management works

How it works

Collectors register with Fleet Management, receive remote configurations, and send health telemetry back to Grafana Cloud.

Fleet Management architecture showing collectors registering with Fleet Management, receiving remote configurations, and sending health telemetry to Grafana Cloud

The flow

  1. Register: The collector registers itself with Fleet Management, declaring its identity, its attributes, and that it’s ready to receive remote configuration.
  2. Discover: Each collector appears in the Fleet Management inventory, where you can see its health status, version, operating system, and the attributes you’ve assigned, such as env, region, or team.
  3. Configure: You create configuration pipelines and assign them to collectors with attribute matching, for example, every collector where env=production.
  4. Distribute: Collectors poll the Fleet Management API for matching configurations.
  5. Monitor: Collector health telemetry flows back to Fleet Management dashboards.

Key concepts

ConceptWhat it means
CollectorA telemetry collector registered with Fleet Management
Configuration pipelineA piece of config that can be assigned remotely
AttributeKey-value pair used to match pipelines to collectors
remotecfg blockLocal config that registers a collector with Fleet Management

Local + remote configs

Grafana Alloy runs local and remote configurations in parallel, isolated from each other. This means:

  • Remote config errors don’t break local config.
  • You can mix and match based on your needs.
  • Gradual migration from local to remote is safe.

The OpenTelemetry Collector works differently. Its Supervisor merges local and remote configuration and doesn’t automatically roll back to the last working remote config, so validate remote changes carefully when using it.

Script

Here’s how Fleet Management works under the hood.

It starts with your collectors. Each collector registers itself with the Fleet Management service. Alloy collectors register using a special block called remotecfg in their local configuration file. OpenTelemetry Collectors register with the OpAMP Supervisor. Each registered collector tells Fleet Management “hey, I exist, I’m allowed to talk to you, here are my attributes, and I’m ready to receive remote configuration.”

Once registered, the collector appears in your Fleet Management inventory in Grafana Cloud. You can see its health status, version, operating system, and any attributes you’ve assigned, like environment, region, or team.

Here’s where it gets powerful. In the Fleet Management interface, you create configuration pipelines. A pipeline is a piece of configuration, maybe a metrics scrape or a processing rule. You assign pipelines to collectors using attribute matching. For example, “apply this pipeline to all collectors where environment equals production.”

The collectors periodically poll the Fleet Management API (by default every 60 seconds) and pull down any matching pipelines. Alloy runs the remote configuration in parallel with its local config, and if there’s a remote config error, Alloy falls back to the last known good configuration. OpenTelemetry Collectors merge their remote and local configurations with careful naming conventions to avoid conflicts but don’t automatically fall back to good configuration.

The result? You define configurations once, assign them matching attributes, and Fleet Management handles distribution to potentially hundreds or thousands of collectors.

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