Install or uninstall Grafana Alloy using Ansible

You can use the Grafana Ansible Collection to install and manage Alloy on Linux hosts.

Before you begin

These steps assume you already have a working Ansible setup and a pre-existing inventory.
You can add the tasks below to any new or existing role.

Steps

To add Alloy to a host:

Create a file named alloy.yml and add the following:

- name: Install Alloy
  hosts: all
  become: true

  tasks:
    - name: Install Alloy
      ansible.builtin.include_role:
        name: grafana.grafana.alloy
      vars:
        alloy_config: |
          prometheus.scrape "default" {
            targets = [{"__address__" = "localhost:12345"}]
            forward_to = [prometheus.remote_write.prom.receiver]
          }
          prometheus.remote_write "prom" {
            endpoint {
                url = "<YOUR_PROMETHEUS_PUSH_ENDPOINT>"
            }
          }

This snippet has a sample configuration to collect and send Alloy metrics to Prometheus

Replace the following:

<YOUR_PROMETHEUS_PUSH_ENDPOINT>: The Remote write endpoint of your Prometheus Instance.

Run the Ansible playbook. Open a terminal window and run the following command from the Ansible playbook directory.
shell
```
ansible-playbook alloy.yml
```

Validate

To verify that the Alloy service on the target machine is active and running, open a terminal window and run the following command:

$ sudo systemctl status alloy.service

If the service is active and running, the output should look similar to this:

alloy.service - Grafana Alloy
  Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/alloy.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
  Active: active (running) since Wed 2022-07-20 09:56:15 UTC; 36s ago
Main PID: 3176 (alloy-linux-amd)
  Tasks: 8 (limit: 515)
  Memory: 92.5M
    CPU: 380ms
  CGroup: /system.slice/alloy.service
    └─3176 /usr/local/bin/alloy-linux-amd64 --config.file=/etc/grafana-cloud/alloy-config.yaml