Grafana Alloy Has a Free Telemetry Collector — OpenTelemetry + Prometheus in One Agent

Grafana Alloy is a vendor-neutral telemetry collector that combines OpenTelemetry and Prometheus.

What You Get for Free

• Metrics — Prometheus scraping + remote write
• Logs — collect and forward logs (Loki, Elasticsearch)
• Traces — OpenTelemetry traces collection
• Profiles — continuous profiling (Pyroscope)
• River configuration — declarative, programmable config language
• Component architecture — mix and match collection pipelines
• Discovery — Kubernetes, Docker, Consul service discovery
• Transformations — filter, relabel, sample, aggregate
• Multiple backends — send to Grafana Cloud, Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Datadog

Quick Start

# Install
sudo apt install alloy

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

# config.alloy — scrape Prometheus metrics
prometheus.scrape "default" {
  targets    = [{"__address__" = "localhost:9090"}]
  forward_to = [prometheus.remote_write.grafana_cloud.receiver]
}

prometheus.remote_write "grafana_cloud" {
  endpoint {
    url = "https://prometheus-xxx.grafana.net/api/prom/push"
  }
}

Why Teams Choose It

Running Prometheus + Promtail + OTel Collector = 3 agents:

• One agent — collects metrics, logs, traces, and profiles
• Vendor-neutral — send data to any backend
• Programmable — River config is more powerful than YAML
• Lower overhead — one process instead of three

A platform team was running 4 different collectors on each node (Prometheus, Promtail, OTel Collector, profiler). They replaced all 4 with Grafana Alloy — one agent, same data collection, 75% less resource usage.

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