Health monitoring on Grafana Labs

Health monitoring

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:03:04 +0000

Core concepts and health monitoring

In this module, you’ll learn the fundamentals of Fleet Management and gain hands-on experience:

How Fleet Management works — Architecture and data flow
Access tokens — Authentication for collectors
Attributes — Organizing your fleet with key-value pairs
Health monitoring — Understanding collector status
Self-monitoring — Automatic health data collection
Hands-on practice — Register a collector and explore health dashboards

Estimated time

15-20 minutes

How Fleet Management works

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:03:04 +0000

How it works

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

The flow

Register — Collectors include remotecfg block in local config
Discover — Collectors appear in Fleet Management inventory
Configure — Create pipelines and assign with attribute matching
Distribute — Collectors poll for matching configurations
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

Access tokens and policies

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:03:04 +0000

Access tokens

Access tokens allow collectors to authenticate with Fleet Management. You’ll create one and add it to your collector configuration.

How it works

Concept	What it is
Access policy	Defines what read/write permissions a token has
Access token	The credential generated from a policy

Required scopes

Scope	Purpose
`set:alloy-data-write`	Lets Alloy collectors register, report health, and receive remote configurations
`set:otel-data-write`	Lets OpenTelemetry collectors register, report health, and receive remote configurations

Where the token goes

remotecfg {
    url = "https://fleet-management-<CLUSTER>.grafana.net/"
    basic_auth {
        username = "<INSTANCE_ID>"
        password = "<YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN>"  // ← token goes here
    }
}

In the learning path, you’ll create an access token and use it to register your Alloy collector.

Attributes

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:03:04 +0000

What are attributes?

An attribute is a key-value pair that describes a collector, like a label or tag that helps Fleet Management understand what each collector is and how to configure it.

Why use attributes

You need attributes to target collectors with configuration pipelines. The better you categorize your fleet with attributes, the more powerful remote configuration becomes:

Configure at scale by targeting multiple collectors with one pipeline
Organize and configure your infrastructure by env, region, team, etc.

Three types of attributes

Type	Description	Set by
Reserved	Preset attributes `collector.os`, `collector.version`, `collector.ID`	Fleet Management (auto)
Local	Set in the `remotecfg` block in local config file	You
Remote	Set in the Fleet Management application in Grafana Cloud	You

Attributes are the language of targeting. They turn “update this one collector’s configuration” into “update all production collectors in us-east.”

Health status indicators

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:03:04 +0000

What Fleet Management checks

Fleet Management continuously monitors your collectors and checks three things. Based on these checks, each collector receives a health status.

Check	Question it answers
Reachability	Can Fleet Management communicate with the collector?
Alerts	Are any user-created alerts firing for this collector?
Config errors	Did the collector load the remote configuration without errors?

Health status indicators

Status	Meaning	Action
Healthy	All checks passing, collector is operational	None needed
Warning	Collector is inactive or has non-critical alerts	Investigate soon
Error	Collector has a critical alert or configuration error	Investigate immediately

The traffic light system: At a glance, you can see which collectors need attention. Green = fine. Yellow = investigate soon. Red = investigate now.

Self-monitoring

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:03:04 +0000

Self-monitoring pipelines

Self-monitoring pipelines are configuration that Fleet Management automatically assigns to each registered collector, instructing it to collect and report its own health data.

Why self-monitoring matters

Without self-monitoring, you’d have a blind spot with no visibility into whether your collectors themselves are healthy.

Scenario	Without self-monitoring	With self-monitoring
Collector runs out of memory	You don’t know until metrics stop arriving	You see memory usage climbing
A component fails	Silent failure, missing data	Component dashboard shows it’s unhealthy
Collector is overloaded	Data arrives late or not at all	Throughput metrics show the issue

You don’t have to configure this. It’s automatic. Self-monitoring is observability for your observability.

Monitor collector health

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:03:04 +0000

Learning path

Monitor collector health

Welcome to the Grafana learning journey that teaches you how to use Grafana Fleet Management to monitor and troubleshoot issues with your collectors.

19 min

Beginner

Docs & blog posts

Open in Grafana Cloud

Complete this learning path directly in your Grafana Cloud stack, or in the Grafana Play stack, with an interactive learning experience.

Open in Grafana Cloud Try in Grafana Play

View on website

Collector registered

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:03:04 +0000

What you accomplished

Created a Fleet Management access token
Added remotecfg block to Alloy configuration
Registered your collector with Fleet Management
Explored the inventory and health dashboards
Learned to interpret collector health status

Skills unlocked

Skill	You can now…
Registration	Register any Alloy collector with Fleet Management
Monitoring	Check health status and troubleshoot issues
Navigation	Find collectors, view details, read logs

What’s next

Now that your collector is registered, you’ll learn to organize your fleet with remote attributes and configure collectors remotely without touching local files.