---
title: "Attributes | Grafana Labs"
description: "Understanding the key-value pairs that organize your fleet"
---

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

## What are attributes?

**An attribute** is a key-value pair that describes a collector, like a label or tag. Fleet Management uses attributes to match configuration pipelines to collectors.

[Attributes describe and organize your collectors](fleet-management-attributes.svg "Attributes describe and organize your collectors")

## Why use attributes

When you have 50 collectors, you don’t want to manage them one by one. You want to say “apply this configuration to all production collectors” or “update all collectors in the us-east region.” Attributes make that possible. You match configuration pipelines to collectors based on their attributes.

The better you categorize your fleet with attributes, the more powerful remote configuration becomes:

- Configure at scale by applying one pipeline to every collector that shares an attribute.
- Organize your fleet by attributes like env, region, or team.

## Three types of attributes

| Type         | Description                                                                   | Set by                  |
|--------------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------|-------------------------|
| **Reserved** | Preset attributes such as `collector.os`, `collector.version`, `collector.ID` | Fleet Management (auto) |
| **Local**    | Set in the collector or Supervisor local config file                          | You                     |
| **Remote**   | Set in the Fleet Management user interface in Grafana Cloud                   | You                     |

OpenTelemetry collectors report additional reserved keys, such as `service.name`, `os.type`, `host.*`, and `cloud.*`.