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Important: This documentation is about an older version. It's relevant only to the release noted, many of the features and functions have been updated or replaced. Please view the current version.

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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:

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

    yaml
    - 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.
  2. 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:

shell
$ 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

Next steps