Grafana Alloy Has a Free OpenTelemetry Collector — Replace Prometheus Agent and Fluentd in One Tool

Grafana Alloy Has a Free OpenTelemetry Collector

You run Prometheus for metrics, Fluentd for logs, Jaeger agent for traces. Three agents on every server. Grafana Alloy replaces all three with one binary.

What Alloy Does

Grafana Alloy (formerly Grafana Agent) is a vendor-agnostic OpenTelemetry collector:

• Metrics — scrape Prometheus endpoints, push to Mimir/Prometheus
• Logs — tail files, parse, send to Loki
• Traces — receive OTLP, send to Tempo/Jaeger
• Profiles — continuous profiling with Pyroscope
• Single binary — one agent for all telemetry types
• River configuration — programmable, type-safe config language

Quick Start

// alloy config
prometheus.scrape "default" {
  targets = [{"__address__" = "localhost:8080"}]
  forward_to = [prometheus.remote_write.mimir.receiver]
}

prometheus.remote_write "mimir" {
  endpoint {
    url = "http://mimir:9009/api/v1/push"
  }
}

loki.source.file "logs" {
  targets = [{"__path__" = "/var/log/*.log"}]
  forward_to = [loki.write.default.receiver]
}

loki.write "default" {
  endpoint {
    url = "http://loki:3100/loki/api/v1/push"
  }
}

Why Alloy Over Separate Agents

1. One binary — instead of 3-4 agents per server
2. OpenTelemetry native — speaks OTLP, Prometheus, Loki natively
3. River config — programmable, no YAML hell
4. Built-in UI — web interface to debug pipelines
5. Component system — compose processing pipelines like LEGO

Alloy vs Other Collectors

Feature	Alloy	OTel Collector	Vector
Metrics	✅ Native	✅	✅
Logs	✅ Native	✅	✅
Traces	✅ Native	✅	✅
Profiles	✅	❌	❌
Config	River	YAML	TOML
Grafana native	✅	❌	❌

Install

# Linux
curl -fsSL https://apt.grafana.com/gpg.key | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/grafana.gpg
sudo apt install alloy

# Docker
docker run -v ./config.alloy:/etc/alloy/config.alloy grafana/alloy

# Kubernetes
helm install alloy grafana/alloy

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Building an observability stack? I help teams set up Grafana + Alloy for unified metrics, logs, and traces.

📧 [e-mail] — Observability consulting

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