Tools: Grafana Alloy Has a Free Telemetry Collector — OpenTelemetry Made Simple - Full Analysis

Tools: Grafana Alloy Has a Free Telemetry Collector — OpenTelemetry Made Simple - Full Analysis

Observability Pipelines Are a Mess

Grafana Alloy: One Collector for Everything

One Config, All Telemetry

Why Teams Switch to Alloy

Alloy vs Alternatives

When to Use Alloy

Install You have Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces. Each needs its own collector. Prometheus needs prometheus.yml, Loki needs promtail, Tempo needs the OTel collector. Three configs, three binaries, three things to maintain. Grafana Alloy is a single binary that collects metrics, logs, traces, and profiles. It replaces Prometheus Agent, Promtail, and the OpenTelemetry Collector — all at once. Metrics, logs, and traces — one file. 1. Fewer Moving Parts Before: Prometheus Agent + Promtail + OTel Collector = 3 binaries

After: Alloy = 1 binary 2. Built-in Service Discovery Alloy discovers Kubernetes pods, Docker containers, EC2 instances automatically. No manual target lists. 3. Pipeline Processing Process, filter, and transform data before it leaves your infrastructure. Monitor your data pipelines with real data. 88+ scrapers on Apify for any website. Custom solutions: [email protected] Templates let you quickly answer FAQs or store snippets for re-use. Hide child comments as well For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse

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// Collect metrics prometheus.scrape "app" { targets = [{__address__ = "localhost:8080"}] forward_to = [prometheus.remote_write.grafana_cloud.receiver] } // Collect logs local.file_match "app_logs" { path_targets = [{__path__ = "/var/log/app/*.log"}] } loki.source.file "logs" { targets = local.file_match.app_logs.targets forward_to = [loki.write.grafana_cloud.receiver] } // Collect traces otelcol.receiver.otlp "traces" { grpc { endpoint = "0.0.0.0:4317" } http { endpoint = "0.0.0.0:4318" } output { traces = [otelcol.exporter.otlp.tempo.input] } } // Collect metrics prometheus.scrape "app" { targets = [{__address__ = "localhost:8080"}] forward_to = [prometheus.remote_write.grafana_cloud.receiver] } // Collect logs local.file_match "app_logs" { path_targets = [{__path__ = "/var/log/app/*.log"}] } loki.source.file "logs" { targets = local.file_match.app_logs.targets forward_to = [loki.write.grafana_cloud.receiver] } // Collect traces otelcol.receiver.otlp "traces" { grpc { endpoint = "0.0.0.0:4317" } http { endpoint = "0.0.0.0:4318" } output { traces = [otelcol.exporter.otlp.tempo.input] } } // Collect metrics prometheus.scrape "app" { targets = [{__address__ = "localhost:8080"}] forward_to = [prometheus.remote_write.grafana_cloud.receiver] } // Collect logs local.file_match "app_logs" { path_targets = [{__path__ = "/var/log/app/*.log"}] } loki.source.file "logs" { targets = local.file_match.app_logs.targets forward_to = [loki.write.grafana_cloud.receiver] } // Collect traces otelcol.receiver.otlp "traces" { grpc { endpoint = "0.0.0.0:4317" } http { endpoint = "0.0.0.0:4318" } output { traces = [otelcol.exporter.otlp.tempo.input] } } // Filter noisy logs before sending loki.process "filter" { forward_to = [loki.write.grafana_cloud.receiver] stage.drop { expression = "healthcheck" } stage.json { expressions = { level = "level", msg = "message" } } } // Filter noisy logs before sending loki.process "filter" { forward_to = [loki.write.grafana_cloud.receiver] stage.drop { expression = "healthcheck" } stage.json { expressions = { level = "level", msg = "message" } } } // Filter noisy logs before sending loki.process "filter" { forward_to = [loki.write.grafana_cloud.receiver] stage.drop { expression = "healthcheck" } stage.json { expressions = { level = "level", msg = "message" } } } # Homebrew brew install grafana/grafana/alloy # Docker docker run grafana/alloy # Kubernetes helm install alloy grafana/alloy # Homebrew brew install grafana/grafana/alloy # Docker docker run grafana/alloy # Kubernetes helm install alloy grafana/alloy # Homebrew brew install grafana/grafana/alloy # Docker docker run grafana/alloy # Kubernetes helm install alloy grafana/alloy - Apache 2.0 license — use anywhere - Single binary — one process, one config - OpenTelemetry native — OTLP in, OTLP out - Prometheus compatible — scrape any Prometheus target - Kubernetes clusters needing full observability - Teams using Grafana stack (Prometheus, Loki, Tempo) - Consolidating multiple collectors into one