Foundations

Installation.

Get the Meridian agent running on your hosts in under five minutes.

Prerequisites

Before installing the Meridian agent, make sure each host has:

A 64-bit Linux kernel ≥ 5.4, macOS 12+, or Windows Server 2019+
Outbound HTTPS access to ingest.meridian.systems on port 443
A workspace API key from your Meridian admin console

Quick start

The recommended path for new hosts

Install via the bootstrap script

Code

The bootstrap script detects your OS, drops the daemon binary at /usr/local/bin/meridian-agent, writes a starter config to /etc/meridian/agent.toml, and registers a systemd unit (or launchd plist on macOS).

Manual install

If you prefer not to pipe a script into sh, you can install by hand.

Download the binary for your platform:

Code

Create the workspace config:

Code

Start the daemon:

Code

Verify

Within thirty seconds of the first boot, the daemon should register with the control plane. To check:

Code

A healthy host reports connected · ingest=ok · clock-skew<25ms. Anything else (backoff, key-rejected, clock-skew>1s) is documented in Troubleshooting.

The agent never blocks the application process. If ingest is unreachable, spans buffer to disk for up to 12h before the oldest are dropped.

Next steps

Read Core concepts to understand how Meridian models a service.
Configure your first OTLP pipeline to start forwarding traces.
Set up Auto-postmortems so the next incident drafts itself.

Agent ready