The RealTheory Collector is a lightweight agent that runs inside your cluster and sends metrics to the RealTheory platform. To function correctly, it needs outbound network access to a small set of destinations. This article describes those connectivity requirements — what the Collector communicates with, where it needs to reach outside the cluster, and what to consider if your cluster routes traffic through a proxy.
The RealTheory Collector has two categories of outbound connectivity: internal cluster communication and external communication to the RealTheory platform. No other outbound connections are required.
Internal connectivity
Within the cluster, the Collector communicates only with standard Kubernetes components. All of these are internal and do not require public egress.
- Kubernetes API server
- Kubelet on each node
- Node metadata server — GKE only
- DCGM — only on nodes with GPUs
External connectivity
The only outbound public destination required is your RealTheory API endpoint. The Collector communicates exclusively with these endpoints for metrics ingestion and control-plane coordination. Your RealTheory API endpoint is the same hostname you use to access the RealTheory Console. The IP address for that hostname can be resolved via standard DNS lookup.
Whitelist the hostname and IP address for your region so the Collector can reach the RealTheory platform.
Proxy configuration
If your cluster routes outbound traffic through a proxy, the Collector must be configured with the correct proxy settings. Without this, the Collector will not be able to reach the RealTheory API endpoints — even if the proxy itself is whitelisted.
Important: Proxy misconfiguration is one of the most common causes of Collector connectivity issues. If the Collector is installed but not reporting data, verify your proxy settings before investigating other causes.
For configuration details and a step-by-step verification guide, see How to verify you have configured the proxy settings correctly.