Overview of Fleet Control

Fleet Control provides centralized and remote command over fleets of managed clusters for instrumentation lifecycle management at scale. Use Fleet Control to:

• Centralize agent operations and reduce manual toil: Install, monitor, configure, and update all agents and integrations in one place.
• Customize fleets for bulk management: Group agents by instrumentation needs and easily upgrade agent versions for entire fleets with a few clicks. No scripts needed.
• Eliminate telemetry gaps: Manage agents on Kubernetes clusters with one lightweight supervisor—Agent Control—that scales across your environment.

To navigate to Fleet Control, go to Capabilities → New Relic Control → Fleets. You can use the pin to add New Relic Control to the left side navigation bar for easy access.

What is a fleet?

In Fleet Control, a fleet is a homogeneous collection of managed entities (such as Kubernetes clusters) that share identical instrumentation configurations. Fleets serve as logical groupings of managed entities, allowing for streamlined management and consistent observability configuration at scale.

A fleet is made up of three main components:

• Active deployment: The most recent deployment summary

• Configurations: The configurations that are being applied to your Kubernetes clusters

• Entities: All the Kubernetes clusters within the fleet

  

Understanding managed entities

In the context of Fleet Control, a managed entity refers to a Kubernetes cluster running New Relic infrastructure and logging instrumentation managed by Agent Control. Agent configuration is specified at the fleet level and every Kubernetes cluster in the fleet shares the same configuration as other clusters in that fleet.

Key features

• Centralized management: Offers a unified platform for administering agents running on fleets of Kubernetes clusters, allowing you to manage instrumentation across your infrastructure at scale.
• Grouping and ownership: Functions as both a grouping mechanism and an ownership boundary, enabling different teams to manage their respective fleets independently while maintaining consistent observability practices.
• Remote configuration: Supports remote configuration of various agents. For details, see scope.

These agents are responsible for monitoring various aspects of your environment and reporting key data points, including metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT).

Prerequisites

Before setting up Fleet Control, ensure that your system meets the following prerequisites:

• Opt in: As Agent Control and Fleet Control are in a public preview, you have to opt in to use the product.
• Agent Control: Ensure you have installed Agent Control on the Kubernetes clusters you plan to add to your fleets.

Required permissions

Organization-scoped permissions: The Organization Manager role (referred to as a Administrative setting in the product) is required to create and edit fleets within Fleet Control.