Collector Group

A Collector Group is a named set of collectors that share one config: the same sources, the same routes, and the same destinations. Use a group when you want to treat several collectors as one logical ingester — for redundancy behind a load balancer, for horizontal scale-out of a heavy source, or just to keep a fleet’s config consistent without copy-pasting.

Mental model

Picture the group as a config template. Edit the group’s routes or destinations once, and every member collector renders the same change into its local OTel config on the next sync. Adding a new collector to the group auto-applies the group’s config; removing one leaves the collector in place but reverts it to whatever per-collector config it held before joining (typically empty).

A collector can belong to zero or one group. There’s no nesting and no multi-group membership — a collector that needs config from two different “templates” instead gets its own routes referencing the shared pipelines those templates would have attached.

The Collectors page lists every enrolled collector. Group membership shows as a chip in the row; the Collector Groups page (sidebar → Collect → Collector Groups) lists the groups themselves.

What group-scoped config materialises

For each member, the server unions the group’s config with the collector’s own per-collector config at generation time:

• Group sources + per-collector sources both render into the OTel config
• Group routes + per-collector routes both evaluate at runtime, sorted by priority across the union
• Group destinations + per-collector destinations both become exporter blocks

So a group is additive, not overriding. Operators usually put the bulk of the fleet’s wiring at the group level and reserve per-collector config for one-offs (a debug destination on one host, a temporary sampling pipeline on another).

Where it lives

Surface	Path
UI	Collect → Collector Groups in the sidebar
Storage	YAML at gitops/groups/<groupID>.yaml for the group itself, plus gitops/groups/<groupID>/sources/…, …/destinations/…, …/routes/… for its scoped activations
Membership	The group YAML’s collectorIds list is authoritative — edit it through the UI’s Members tab, not by hand

See also

• Collector — the unit a group is made of
• Route — scoped to either a collector or a group via RouteScope
• Destination — same scoping model; a group-scoped destination is the cleanest way to send a whole fleet to one Grafana Cloud stack