Installation.

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

curl -sSL https://get.meridian.systems | \
  MERIDIAN_KEY="$KEY" sh

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.

1. Download the binary for your platform:

curl -L https://dl.meridian.systems/agent/v1/linux-amd64.tar.gz \
  | tar -xz -C /usr/local/bin meridian-agent

2. Create the workspace config:

sudo install -d /etc/meridian
sudo tee /etc/meridian/agent.toml <<'TOML'
workspace = "acme-prod"
ingest    = "ingest.meridian.systems:443"
key       = "${MERIDIAN_KEY}"
TOML

3. Start the daemon:

sudo systemctl enable --now meridian-agent

Verify

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

meridian-agent status

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.