Migrate from Grafana Agent Operator to Grafana Alloy

You can migrate from Grafana Agent Operator to Alloy.

The Monitor types (PodMonitor, ServiceMonitor, Probe, and PodLogs) are all supported natively by Alloy.
The parts of Grafana Agent Operator that deploy the Grafana Agent itself (GrafanaAgent, MetricsInstance, and LogsInstance CRDs) are deprecated.

Deploy Alloy with Helm

Create a values.yaml file, which contains options for deploying Alloy. You can start with the default values and customize as you see fit, or start with this snippet, which should be a good starting point for what Grafana Agent Operator does.
yaml
```
alloy:
  configMap:
    create: true
  clustering:
    enabled: true
controller:
  type: 'statefulset'
  replicas: 2
crds:
  create: false
```
This configuration deploys Alloy as a StatefulSet using the built-in clustering functionality to allow distributing scrapes across all Alloy pods.
This is one of many deployment possible modes. For example, you may want to use a DaemonSet to collect host-level logs or metrics. See the Alloy deployment guide for more details about different topologies.
Create an Alloy configuration file, config.alloy.
In the next step, you add to this configuration as you convert MetricsInstances. You can add any additional configuration to this file as you need.

Install the Grafana Helm repository:

helm repo add grafana https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo update

Create a Helm release. You can name the release anything you like. The following command installs a release called alloy-metrics in the monitoring namespace.
shell
```
helm upgrade alloy-metrics grafana/alloy -i -n monitoring -f values.yaml --set-file alloy.configMap.content=config.alloy
```
This command uses the --set-file flag to pass the configuration file as a Helm value so that you can continue to edit it as a regular Alloy configuration file.

Convert `MetricsInstance` to Alloy components

A MetricsInstance resource primarily defines:

The remote endpoints Grafana Agent should send metrics to.
The PodMonitor, ServiceMonitor, and Probe resources this Alloy should discover.

You can use these functions in Alloy with the prometheus.remote_write, prometheus.operator.podmonitors, prometheus.operator.servicemonitors, and prometheus.operator.probes components respectively.

The following Alloy syntax sample is equivalent to the MetricsInstance from the operator guide.


// read the credentials secret for remote_write authorization
remote.kubernetes.secret "credentials" {
  namespace = "monitoring"
  name = "primary-credentials-metrics"
}

prometheus.remote_write "primary" {
    endpoint {
        url = "https://<PROMETHEUS_URL>/api/v1/push"
        basic_auth {
            username = nonsensitive(remote.kubernetes.secret.credentials.data["username"])
            password = remote.kubernetes.secret.credentials.data["password"]
        }
    }
}

prometheus.operator.podmonitors "primary" {
    forward_to = [prometheus.remote_write.primary.receiver]
    // leave out selector to find all podmonitors in the entire cluster
    selector {
        match_labels = {instance = "primary"}
    }
}

prometheus.operator.servicemonitors "primary" {
    forward_to = [prometheus.remote_write.primary.receiver]
    // leave out selector to find all servicemonitors in the entire cluster
    selector {
        match_labels = {instance = "primary"}
    }
}

Replace the following:

<PROMETHEUS_URL>: The endpoint you want to send metrics to.

This configuration discovers all PodMonitor, ServiceMonitor, and Probe resources in your cluster that match the label selector instance=primary. It then scrapes metrics from the targets and forward them to your remote write endpoint.

You may need to customize this configuration further if you use additional features in your MetricsInstance resources. Refer to the documentation for the relevant components for additional information:

Collecting Logs

Our current recommendation is to create an additional DaemonSet deployment of Alloys to scrape logs.

We have components that can scrape pod logs directly from the Kubernetes API without needing a DaemonSet deployment. These are still considered experimental, but if you would like to try them, see the documentation for loki.source.kubernetes and loki.source.podlogs.

These values are close to what Grafana Agent Operator deploys for logs:

alloy:
  configMap:
    create: true
  clustering:
    enabled: false
  controller:
    type: 'daemonset'
  mounts:
    # -- Mount /var/log from the host into the container for log collection.
    varlog: true

This command installs a release named alloy-logs in the monitoring namespace:

helm upgrade alloy-logs grafana/alloy -i -n monitoring -f values-logs.yaml --set-file alloy.configMap.content=config-logs.alloy

This simple configuration scrapes logs for every Pod on each node:

// read the credentials secret for remote_write authorization
remote.kubernetes.secret "credentials" {
  namespace = "monitoring"
  name      = "primary-credentials-logs"
}

discovery.kubernetes "pods" {
  role = "pod"
  // limit to pods on this node to reduce the amount you need to filter
  selectors {
    role  = "pod"
    field = "spec.nodeName=" + env("<HOSTNAME>")
  }
}

discovery.relabel "pod_logs" {
  targets = discovery.kubernetes.pods.targets
  rule {
    source_labels = ["__meta_kubernetes_namespace"]
    target_label  = "namespace"
  }
  rule {
    source_labels = ["__meta_kubernetes_pod_name"]
    target_label  = "pod"
  }
  rule {
    source_labels = ["__meta_kubernetes_pod_container_name"]
    target_label  = "container"
  }
  rule {
    source_labels = ["__meta_kubernetes_namespace", "__meta_kubernetes_pod_name"]
    separator     = "/"
    target_label  = "job"
  }
  rule {
    source_labels = ["__meta_kubernetes_pod_uid", "__meta_kubernetes_pod_container_name"]
    separator     = "/"
    action        = "replace"
    replacement   = "/var/log/pods/*$1/*.log"
    target_label  = "__path__"
  }
  rule {
    action = "replace"
    source_labels = ["__meta_kubernetes_pod_container_id"]
    regex = "^(\\w+):\\/\\/.+$"
    replacement = "$1"
    target_label = "tmp_container_runtime"
  }
}

local.file_match "pod_logs" {
  path_targets = discovery.relabel.pod_logs.output
}

loki.source.file "pod_logs" {
  targets    = local.file_match.pod_logs.targets
  forward_to = [loki.process.pod_logs.receiver]
}

// basic processing to parse the container format. You can add additional processing stages
// to match your application logs.
loki.process "pod_logs" {
  stage.match {
    selector = "{tmp_container_runtime=\"containerd\"}"
    // the cri processing stage extracts the following k/v pairs: log, stream, time, flags
    stage.cri {}
    // Set the extract flags and stream values as labels
    stage.labels {
      values = {
        flags   = "",
        stream  = "",
      }
    }
  }

  // if the label tmp_container_runtime from above is docker parse using docker
  stage.match {
    selector = "{tmp_container_runtime=\"docker\"}"
    // the docker processing stage extracts the following k/v pairs: log, stream, time
    stage.docker {}

    // Set the extract stream value as a label
    stage.labels {
      values = {
        stream  = "",
      }
    }
  }

  // drop the temporary container runtime label as it is no longer needed
  stage.label_drop {
    values = ["tmp_container_runtime"]
  }

  forward_to = [loki.write.loki.receiver]
}

loki.write "loki" {
  endpoint {
    url = "https://<LOKI_URL>/loki/api/v1/push"
    basic_auth {
      username = nonsensitive(remote.kubernetes.secret.credentials.data["username"])
      password = remote.kubernetes.secret.credentials.data["password"]
    }
}
}

Replace the following:

<LOKI_URL>: The endpoint of your Loki instance.

The logging subsystem is very powerful and has many options for processing logs. For further details, see the component documentation.

Integrations

The Integration CRD isn’t supported with Alloy. However, all Grafana Agent Static mode integrations have an equivalent component in the prometheus.exporter namespace. The reference documentation should help convert those integrations to their Alloy equivalent.