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Last reviewed: October 6, 2026

The Alloy OpenTelemetry Engine

The OTel Engine is an OpenTelemetry Collector distribution embedded in Alloy. It runs standard OpenTelemetry Collector YAML configuration without translating it to Alloy syntax.

You can run it with the CLI, the OpenTelemetry Collector Helm chart, or a service installation. To run a Default Engine pipeline inside the OTel Engine, add the Alloy Engine extension to any of these. You can also build your own binary with the OpenTelemetry Collector Builder.

To manage the OTel Engine configuration remotely, use the otel-supervisor command. It runs the OTel Engine under an embedded OpAMP supervisor that receives the configuration from Grafana Fleet Management.

To learn when to use each engine, refer to OpenTelemetry in Alloy.

EXPERIMENTAL: OTel Engine is an experimental feature. Experimental features are subject to frequent breaking changes, and may be removed with no equivalent replacement.

To maintain full compatibility of the OTel Engine with the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector and expose a compatible command line interface, the OTel Engine isn’t hidden behind a stability flag.

Make sure that you understand the risks involved before using an experimental feature in your production environments.

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