Hi everyone
I am planning on creating a tagging concept for Grafana Fleet Management, so I can minimize the count of failed configuration deployments to Grafana Alloy collectors in production environments, using tags like “PROD”, “TEST” or “DEV”.
Now I’m wondering if anyone has already some experience with this or if there are any “best practices” in this regard? Is it sensible to create tags per system I want to receive data from or maybe per component (like prometheus, loki, otel etc.)? I am especially thinking about larger environments, where multiple collectors are necessary in regards of high availability and performance.
Looking forward to hearing about your experiences about this.
I suppose by ‘tags’ what you’re referring to is collector attributes, right? The foremost use of those is to assign configuration pipelines as well as group and filter the high-level health and status views for the entire fleet.
Is it sensible to create tags per system I want to receive data from or maybe per component
Your strategy around attributes mostly depends on who is deploying and configuring your Alloy instances, and how clear-cut of the distinction between the different deployments is. So if you know beforehand which collectors will be exclusively running Prometheus/Loki/OTel pipelines, and this never changes, then these can just as well be defined upfront for direct matching.
But in my opinion, many times this distinction isn’t as clear, so what I feel works well is to start using a set of ‘infrastructure’ attributes populated during provisioning (like cluster, namespace, owning team(s), disk type, department, environment i.e. dev/test/prod like you said) and then map your various pipelines on these.
This decouples the provisioning from the use, allows to safely roll configurations gradually, enables teams to manage their telemetry flows independently, and provides an easier ‘logical’ grouping when drilling down signals from an alert.
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Appreciate you taking the time! Your infrastructure centered take on the attributes makes a lot of sense. I will try and adapt this to my future deployment.
