Telemetry collector

What is Grafana Alloy?

Grafana Alloy is an open source OpenTelemetry collector with built-in Prometheus pipelines and support for metrics, logs, traces, and profiles.

GitHub project

Blog announcement

Documentation

Grafana Alloy overview

Grafana Alloy is Grafana Labs’ distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector. It is an OTLP-compatible collector with built-in Prometheus optimizations that also supports signals across metrics, logs, traces, and profiles.

Alloy was started at Grafana Labs and announced at GrafanaCON in 2024. The mission for the project is to create the best “big tent” collector that’s compatible with the most popular open source observability ecosystems and includes enterprise-grade features to simplify operating at scale in a modern cloud native infrastructure.

Grafana Labs is proud to lead the development of the Alloy project, building first-class support for Alloy into Grafana and ensuring Grafana Labs customers receive Alloy support and features they need.

Why use Grafana Alloy as an OpenTelemetry collector?

Pull configs from anywhere, such as GitHub, S3, and HTTP endpoints

Natively ingest metrics, logs, traces, and profiles with compatibility formats like Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope.

Enable SREs to get production-ready pipelines immediately with Alloy modules that can distill a large config file into a single module that’s just a few lines. Modules can be prebuilt by the community or packaged together from Grafana.

Get better workload distribution and high availability against pull-based workloads with built-in clustering

Connect to a HashiCorp Vault server to retrieve secrets and avoid managing authentication credentials and tokens locally

Easily troubleshoot issues at configuration time with an embedded debugging UI that’s viewable from the Alloy HTTP server

How does Grafana Alloy work as an OpenTelemetry collector?

Collect

Grafana Alloy uses more than 120 components to collect telemetry data from applications, databases, and OpenTelemetry collectors. Alloy supports collection using multiple ecosystems, including OpenTelemetry and Prometheus.

Telemetry data can be either pushed to Grafana Alloy, or Grafana Alloy can pull it from your data sources.

Transform

Grafana Alloy processes data and transforms it for sending.

Transformations can be used to inject extra metadata into telemetry or filter out unwanted data.

Write

Grafana Alloy sends data to OpenTelemetry-compatible databases or collectors, the Grafana LGTM stack, or Grafana Cloud.

Grafana Alloy can additionally write alerting rules in compatible databases.

Choose the version that’s best for you

To use Grafana Alloy, you have three options to instrument and connect your data:

Grafana Alloy

Open source

Distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector that combines native support for both OTLP and Prometheus pipelines, with built-in clustering and Vault support. Deploy anywhere and connect to your backend of choice.

Download

Easiest way to get started

Grafana Cloud

Free forever

Connect Alloy to Grafana Cloud for access to our full catalog of cloud solutions and integrations. Get a dedicated UI for monitoring the health and performance of your collectors.

Create free account