Application Observability with Grafana Alloy

Grafana Alloy (formerly Grafana Agent) is a vendor-neutral distribution of the OpenTelemetry (OTel) Collector and the recommended way to send OpenTelemetry data to Grafana Cloud. Grafana Alloy will act as an outbound gateway providing reliability and scalability.

Prerequisites

To set up Grafana Alloy as a data collector and send data to Grafana Cloud:

Create and/or login to a Grafana Cloud account
Install Grafana Alloy

We require that the Alloy is run on every host for Application Observability to function optimally. This also allows us to have a seamless correlation between Application and Infrastructure observability.

Configuration

An alloy-config.river configuration file is needed for the Grafana Alloy to run successfully in flow mode. It is recommended to use the OpenTelemetry (OTLP) integration to generate a configuration file.

Navigate to the OpenTelemetry Application page and click the Add service button. Choose the OpenTelemetry (OTLP) integration from the list.

The OpenTelemetry (OTLP) integration will generate a Grafana Alloy configuration to use with Grafana Application Observability:

otelcol.receiver.otlp "default" {
	// https://grafana.com/docs/alloy/latest/reference/components/otelcol.receiver.otlp/

	// configures the default grpc endpoint "0.0.0.0:4317"
	grpc { }
	// configures the default http/protobuf endpoint "0.0.0.0:4318"
	http { }

	output {
		metrics = [otelcol.processor.resourcedetection.default.input]
		logs    = [otelcol.processor.resourcedetection.default.input]
		traces  = [otelcol.processor.resourcedetection.default.input]
	}
}

otelcol.processor.resourcedetection "default" {
	// https://grafana.com/docs/alloy/latest/reference/components/otelcol.processor.resourcedetection/
	detectors = ["env", "system"] // add "gcp", "ec2", "ecs", "elastic_beanstalk", "eks", "lambda", "azure", "aks", "consul", "heroku"  if you want to use cloud resource detection

	system {
		hostname_sources = ["os"]
	}

	output {
		metrics = [otelcol.processor.transform.drop_unneeded_resource_attributes.input]
		logs    = [otelcol.processor.transform.drop_unneeded_resource_attributes.input]
		traces  = [otelcol.processor.transform.drop_unneeded_resource_attributes.input]
	}
}

otelcol.processor.transform "drop_unneeded_resource_attributes" {
	// https://grafana.com/docs/alloy/latest/reference/components/otelcol.processor.transform/
	error_mode = "ignore"

	trace_statements {
		context    = "resource"
		statements = [
			"delete_key(attributes, \"k8s.pod.start_time\")",
			"delete_key(attributes, \"os.description\")",
			"delete_key(attributes, \"os.type\")",
			"delete_key(attributes, \"process.command_args\")",
			"delete_key(attributes, \"process.executable.path\")",
			"delete_key(attributes, \"process.pid\")",
			"delete_key(attributes, \"process.runtime.description\")",
			"delete_key(attributes, \"process.runtime.name\")",
			"delete_key(attributes, \"process.runtime.version\")",
		]
	}

	metric_statements {
		context    = "resource"
		statements = [
			"delete_key(attributes, \"k8s.pod.start_time\")",
			"delete_key(attributes, \"os.description\")",
			"delete_key(attributes, \"os.type\")",
			"delete_key(attributes, \"process.command_args\")",
			"delete_key(attributes, \"process.executable.path\")",
			"delete_key(attributes, \"process.pid\")",
			"delete_key(attributes, \"process.runtime.description\")",
			"delete_key(attributes, \"process.runtime.name\")",
			"delete_key(attributes, \"process.runtime.version\")",
		]
	}

	log_statements {
		context    = "resource"
		statements = [
			"delete_key(attributes, \"k8s.pod.start_time\")",
			"delete_key(attributes, \"os.description\")",
			"delete_key(attributes, \"os.type\")",
			"delete_key(attributes, \"process.command_args\")",
			"delete_key(attributes, \"process.executable.path\")",
			"delete_key(attributes, \"process.pid\")",
			"delete_key(attributes, \"process.runtime.description\")",
			"delete_key(attributes, \"process.runtime.name\")",
			"delete_key(attributes, \"process.runtime.version\")",
		]
	}

	output {
		metrics = [otelcol.processor.transform.add_resource_attributes_as_metric_attributes.input]
		logs    = [otelcol.processor.batch.default.input]
		traces  = [
			otelcol.processor.batch.default.input,
			otelcol.connector.host_info.default.input,
		]
	}
}

otelcol.connector.host_info "default" {
	// https://grafana.com/docs/alloy/latest/reference/components/otelcol.connector.host_info/
	host_identifiers = ["host.name"]

	output {
		metrics = [otelcol.processor.batch.default.input]
	}
}

otelcol.processor.transform "add_resource_attributes_as_metric_attributes" {
	// https://grafana.com/docs/alloy/latest/reference/components/otelcol.processor.transform/
	error_mode = "ignore"

	metric_statements {
		context    = "datapoint"
		statements = [
			"set(attributes[\"deployment.environment\"], resource.attributes[\"deployment.environment\"])",
			"set(attributes[\"service.version\"], resource.attributes[\"service.version\"])",
		]
	}

	output {
		metrics = [otelcol.processor.batch.default.input]
	}
}

otelcol.processor.batch "default" {
	// https://grafana.com/docs/alloy/latest/reference/components/otelcol.processor.batch/
	output {
		metrics = [otelcol.exporter.otlphttp.grafana_cloud.input]
		logs    = [otelcol.exporter.otlphttp.grafana_cloud.input]
		traces  = [otelcol.exporter.otlphttp.grafana_cloud.input]
	}
}

otelcol.exporter.otlphttp "grafana_cloud" {
	// https://grafana.com/docs/alloy/latest/reference/components/otelcol.exporter.otlphttp/
	client {
		endpoint = env("GRAFANA_CLOUD_OTLP_ENDPOINT")
		auth     = otelcol.auth.basic.grafana_cloud.handler
	}
}

otelcol.auth.basic "grafana_cloud" {
	// https://grafana.com/docs/alloy/latest/reference/components/otelcol.auth.basic/
	username = env("GRAFANA_CLOUD_INSTANCE_ID")
	password = env("GRAFANA_CLOUD_API_KEY")
}

The configuration file requires several environmental variable to be set:

Environment Variable	Description	Example
`GRAFANA_CLOUD_API_KEY`	API key generated above	`eyJvSomeLongStringJ9fQ==`
`GRAFANA_CLOUD_OTLP_ENDPOINT`	OTLP Endpoint from Grafana Cloud > OpenTelemetry > Configure	`https://otlp-gateway-***.grafana.net/otlp`
`GRAFANA_CLOUD_INSTANCE_ID`	Instance ID from Grafana Cloud > OpenTelemetry > Configure	`11111`