Set up OpenTelemetry Collector
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Set up OpenTelemetry Collector

For production observability, Grafana Labs recommends Grafana Alloy, an OpenTelemetry Collector distribution, that gives you seamless correlation between Infrastructure and Application observability.

Grafana Alloy offers the following benefits:

  1. Cost control: Grafana Alloy aggregates and drops telemetry data to only send relevant data and reduce costs.
  2. Scalability and reliability: An OpenTelemetry Collector buffers and retries data so you don’t lose data during connection issues.
  3. Flexibility: Grafana Alloy simplifies configuration and manages complex data pipelines through enrichment, transformation, redaction, and routing.

Application Observability - Architecture

Grafana Alloy

Grafana Labs maintains Grafana Alloy, and packages various upstream OpenTelemetry Collector components and Prometheus exporters, to provide stability, support, and an integrated experience with Grafana Application Observability and other Grafana products.

Consult the Grafana Alloy documentation for the recommended and supported way to send telemetry data for infrastructure and applications to Grafana Cloud.

Grafana Alloy for Kubernetes

If you deploy your application in Kubernetes, we recommend the Grafana Kubernetes Monitoring helm chart which supports Application Observability and Kubernetes Monitoring.

Consult the Kubernetes Monitoring with Grafana Alloy documentation for more information.

OpenTelemetry Collector

The OpenTelemetry project maintainers and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation maintain the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector.

Consult the Grafana OpenTelemetry Collector documentation to use the upstream community supported OpenTelemetry Collector with Application Observability.

Kubernetes OpenTelemetry Operator

If you use the upstream community supported OpenTelemetry Collector and deploy your application in Kubernetes, you can use the OpenTelemetry Operator to instrument your application and send telemetry data to Grafana Cloud without modifying your services.