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Documentation Grafana Enterprise Logs Send data

Send log data to Grafana Enterprise Logs

The following clients are the supported clients for sending logs to Grafana Enterprise Logs (GEL):

• Grafana Alloy - Grafana Alloy is a vendor-neutral distribution of the OpenTelemetry (OTel) Collector. Alloy offers native pipelines for OTel, Prometheus, Pyroscope, Loki, and many other metrics, logs, traces, and profile tools. In addition, you can use Alloy pipelines to do different tasks, such as configure alert rules in Loki and Mimir. Alloy is fully compatible with the OTel Collector, Prometheus Agent, and Promtail. You can use Alloy as an alternative to either of these solutions or combine it into a hybrid system of multiple collectors and agents. You can deploy Alloy anywhere within your IT infrastructure and pair it with your Grafana LGTM stack, a telemetry backend from Grafana Cloud, or any other compatible backend from any other vendor.

  Caution

  Grafana Alloy is the new name for our distribution of the OTel collector. Grafana Agent has been deprecated and is in Long-Term Support (LTS) through October 31, 2025. Grafana Agent will reach an End-of-Life (EOL) on November 1, 2025. Read more about why we recommend migrating to Grafana Alloy.

• Grafana Agent - The Grafana Agent is a client for the Grafana stack. It can collect telemetry data for metrics, logs, traces, and continuous profiles and is fully compatible with the Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and Grafana open source ecosystems.
• Promtail - Promtail can be configured to automatically scrape logs from Kubernetes pods running on the same node that Promtail runs on. Promtail and Prometheus running together in Kubernetes enables powerful debugging: if Prometheus and Promtail use the same labels, users can use tools like Grafana to switch between metrics and logs based on the label set. Promtail can be configured to tail logs from all files given a host path. It is the easiest way to send logs to Loki from plain-text files (for example, things that log to /var/log/*.log). Promtail works well if you want to extract metrics from logs such as counting the occurrences of a particular message.

  Note

  Promtail is feature complete. All future feature development will occur in Grafana Alloy.

• OpenTelemetry Collector Grafana Enterprise Logs natively supports ingesting OpenTelemetry logs over HTTP. For more information, refer to Ingesting logs to Loki using OpenTelemetry Collector.
• xk6-loki extension - The k6-loki extension lets you perform load testing on Loki. The xk6-loki extension permits pushing logs to and querying logs from a GEL instance. It acts as a client, simulating real-world load to test the scalability, reliability, and performance of your GEL installation.