Manage OpenTelemetry Agents and Collectors

Understand how to use OpenTelemetry Fleet Management to centrally control the configuration, deployment, and health of your OTel ecosystem.

OpenTelemetry Fleet Management provides a centralized control plane to view your entire OpenTelemetry (OTel) ecosystem. You can monitor agent inventory, and audit configurations across Linux, Windows, and Kubernetes environments without requiring direct access to the underlying application code.

Understanding OpAMP

The Open Agent Management Protocol (OpAMP) is the communication protocol that facilitates OpenTelemetry Fleet Management. It provides a standardized framework for remotely managing, monitoring, and configuring software agents across distributed systems.

OpAMP enables the following capabilities:

  • Update agent settings and configurations centrally without manual intervention.
  • Real-time tracking of agent status and performance metrics.

Integrated natively with the OpenTelemetry Collector and agents, OpAMP bridges your distributed infrastructure and the Splunk Observability Cloud control plane.

Supported Platforms

This solution supports the following environments:

  • Linux

  • Windows

  • Kubernetes

Supported Clients

  • Splunk distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector (Agent and Gateway modes) 0.126.0 and later.

  • Splunk distribution of Java Agent 2.27.0 or later

OpenTelemetry Fleet Management Architecture

The OpenTelemetry Fleet Management architecture establishes a secure control plane from your clients (agents or collectors) to the Splunk Observability Cloud. By utilizing the OpenTelemetry Agent Management Protocol (OpAMP), the system ensures that your telemetry pipeline remains consistent, observable, and easily configurable.

These components are part of the architecture:

Component Description
Java Agent Java agent collects the data. It initiates communication using the OpAMP protocol to receive configuration updates or report the current status of the agent.
OpenTelemetry Collector Acts as an intermediary between the agents and the server. It proxies the OpAMP requests and establishes self-reporting.
Fleet Management Server The central OpAMP server hosted within the Splunk Observability Cloud. It coordinates the lifecycle, configuration, and operational state of the agent fleet.
Application Programming Interface The endpoint used for management operations and administrative interaction. Endpoint: api.<tenant>.observability.splunkcloud.com/v2/fm-service
Management Path The dedicated channel for OpAMP-specific signaling.

Endpoint: ingest.<tenant>.observability.splunkcloud.com/v1/opamp
Communication Protocol The architecture utilizes the HTTP-based OpAMP (Open Agent Management Protocol) to ensure standardized communication among all components.

Workflow

  1. Establish collector management connection: The Collector initiates an OpAMP connection to the Fleet Management Server through HTTPS.
  2. Establish agent-to-collector management path: Application agents connect to the local Collector OpAMP proxy. The Collector maintains pooled upstream OpAMP sessions for the connected agents.
  3. Register and report inventory: Clients register with the Fleet Management Server and report identity, platform, and capabilities.
  4. Inventory and configuration retrieval: Use the Fleet Management APIs (<tenant>.observability.splunkcloud.com/v2/fm-service) to query fleet state and retrieve configurations.
  5. Data plane ingestion: OpAMP traffic is directed to the dedicated /v1/opamp management endpoint. Agents and collectors send telemetry (traces/metrics/logs) to Splunk Observability Cloud over dedicated OTLP ingest endpoints.
  6. Status and health reporting: Agents and collectors continuously report effective config, health, and errors over OpAMP to the Fleet Management Server.
  7. Failure and reconnect behavior: If connectivity is lost, components continue running with the last known good config and automatically retry TLS-authenticated reconnects.

Get Started with OpenTelemetry Fleet Management

To get started, install the latest Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector distribution. You must explicitly enable OpAMP, as it is not enabled by default. See Configure OpenTelemetry Fleet Management.

For more information about the APIs, see Manage OpenTelemetry Agents Using APIs and for detailed API documentation, see Client Inventory API at Splunk API Reference Documentation.