Documentation Grafana Cloud Monitor applications Application Observability Set up OpenTelemetry Collector Alloy with Kubernetes

Application Observability and Kubernetes Monitoring integration

For production observability, Grafana Labs recommends Grafana Alloy, an OpenTelemetry Collector distribution, that 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.

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

Setup

To set up the Grafana Kubernetes Monitoring helm chart, refer to the Configure Kubernetes Monitoring with Grafana Kubernetes Monitoring Helm chart documentation.

OTLP receivers

Enable the OTLP Receivers option from the Cluster Configuration tab:

OTLP endpoints

Configure instrumentation to send telemetry data to Alloy using one of the addresses provided in the Configure Application Instrumentation section in the Cluster Configuration tab:

Copy the relevant endpoint and edit the following scripts that set instrumentation environment variables:

gRPC:

shell Copy

export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=<GRPC_ENDPOINT>
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=grpc

HTTP:

shell Copy

export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=<HTTP_ENDPOINT>
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=http/protobuf

Next steps

Observe your services in Application Observability