---
title: "How Fleet Management works | Grafana Labs"
description: "Architecture and data flow overview"
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

## 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](fleet-management-architecture.svg "Fleet Management architecture showing collectors registering with Fleet Management, receiving remote configurations, and sending health telemetry to Grafana Cloud")

## The flow

1. **Register** — Collectors include `remotecfg` block in local config
2. **Discover** — Collectors appear in Fleet Management inventory
3. **Configure** — Create pipelines and assign with attribute matching
4. **Distribute** — Collectors poll for matching configurations
5. **Monitor** — Collector health telemetry flows to Fleet Management dashboards

## Key concepts

| Concept                    | What it means                                                 |
|----------------------------|---------------------------------------------------------------|
| **Collector**              | An agent registered with Fleet Management                     |
| **Configuration pipeline** | A piece of config that can be assigned remotely               |
| **Attribute**              | Key-value pair used to match pipelines to collectors          |
| **remotecfg block**        | Local config that registers a collector with Fleet Management |

## Local + remote configs

The collector 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