Documentation Grafana Cloud Instrument and send data Fleet Management Set up Collector onboarding Kubernetes

Onboard collectors deployed in Kubernetes to Fleet Management

Learn how to register your collectors in Kubernetes with Grafana Fleet Management.

Grafana Alloy Helm chart

Onboard and configure your collector using the Alloy Helm chart.

1. Create a secret you can use as an access token for Fleet Management.

   shell Copy

   kubectl create secret --namespace NAMESPACE generic gc-token --from-literal=token=VALUE

2. Create a ConfigMap from a file and add the following remotecfg block to the configuration.

   alloy Copy

   remotecfg {
           url            = "<URL>"
           id             = sys.env("GCLOUD_FM_COLLECTOR_ID")
   
           attributes = { "platform" = "kubernetes" }
   
           basic_auth {
                   username = "<USERNAME>"
                   password = sys.env("GCLOUD_RW_API_KEY")
           }
   }

   Replace <URL> with the base URL of the Fleet Management service and <USERNAME> with your instance ID, both of which can be found on the API tab in the Fleet Management interface.

3. Update your Helm chart as follows.

   yaml Copy

   gc:
     secret:
       name: gc-token
   
   alloy:
     configMap:
       create: false
       name: alloy-config
       key: config.alloy
     stabilityLevel: "public-preview"
     extraEnv:
       - name: NAMESPACE
         valueFrom:
           fieldRef:
             fieldPath: metadata.namespace
       - name: POD_NAME
         valueFrom:
           fieldRef:
             fieldPath: metadata.name
       - name: GCLOUD_FM_COLLECTOR_ID
         value: "clusterName-$(NAMESPACE)-$(POD_NAME)"
       - name: GCLOUD_RW_API_KEY
         valueFrom:
           secretKeyRef:
             name: gc-token
             key: token

   In addition to specifying the Alloy configuration file, this chart section also sets:

   • The stabilityLevel to public-preview. Alloy requires by default that its components be generally available. Since the remotecfg block is in public preview, the stabilityLevel must be set to public-preview.
   • The environment variables GCLOUD_FM_COLLECTOR_ID and GCLOUD_RW_API_KEY. These variables must be set so that the self-monitoring configuration pipelines are properly assigned.
     • GCLOUD_FM_COLLECTOR_ID is set to the pod name. The variable is reset each time the pod gets a new name, which means a new collector appears in the Inventory tab. You can delete old, unused collectors from your inventory.
     • GCLOUD_RW_API_KEY is set to the secret you created in step 1.

Grafana Kubernetes Monitoring Helm chart

From v2.0.0 of the Kubernetes Monitoring Helm chart, support for Fleet Management is built in. You can enable Fleet Management by setting remoteConfig to true:

yaml Copy

cluster:
  name: remote-config-example-cluster

alloy-metrics:
  enabled: true
  alloy:
    stabilityLevel: public-preview
  remoteConfig:
    enabled: true
    url: "<URL>"
    auth:
      type: "basic"
      username: "<USERNAME>"
      password: "<PASSWORD>"

Replace <URL> with the base URL of the Fleet Management service and <USERNAME> with your instance ID, both of which can be found on the API tab in the Fleet Management interface. The password value is the token assigned to your Fleet Management access policy. Refer to Create an access policy for more details.

Fleet Management is not recommended for use with earlier versions of the Kubernetes Monitoring Helm chart.

Self-monitoring configuration pipelines

When you visit the Fleet Management interface in Grafana Cloud after registering a collector, a set of self-monitoring configuration pipelines are automatically created and assigned to registered collectors. The internal telemetry collected by the self-monitoring pipelines powers the health dashboards and logs in the collector’s details view in the Fleet Management interface. These pipelines, which begin with self_monitoring_*, rely on environment variables to authenticate requests and set collector_id labels that match telemetry to collectors. In order to see a collector’s health details in Fleet Management, make sure the environment variables GCLOUD_RW_API_KEY and GCLOUD_FM_COLLECTOR_ID are set wherever the collector is running.

Although development of self-monitoring configuration pipelines is ongoing, the logs pipeline does not work out of the box with Kubernetes deployments.

Next steps

• Upgrade your collectors to make sure the new configuration takes effect.
• Add attributes to your collectors for greater control over which configurations are applied and when.