Documentation Grafana Cloud Instrument and send data Grafana Alloy Reference Components otelcol otelcol.processor.interval

Experimental

otelcol.processor.interval

EXPERIMENTAL: This is an experimental component. Experimental components are subject to frequent breaking changes, and may be removed with no equivalent replacement. The stability.level flag must be set to experimental to use the component.

otelcol.processor.interval aggregates metrics and periodically forwards the latest values to the next component in the pipeline. The processor supports aggregating the following metric types:

• Monotonically increasing, cumulative sums
• Monotonically increasing, cumulative histograms
• Monotonically increasing, cumulative exponential histograms
• Gauges
• Summaries

The following metric types will not be aggregated and will instead be passed, unchanged, to the next component in the pipeline:

• All delta metrics
• Non-monotonically increasing sums

Usage

alloy Copy

otelcol.processor.interval "LABEL" {
  output {
    metrics = [...]
  }
}

Arguments

otelcol.processor.interval supports the following arguments:

Blocks

The following blocks are supported inside the definition of otelcol.processor.interval:

output block

The output block configures a set of components to forward resulting telemetry data to.

The following arguments are supported:

You must specify the output block, but all its arguments are optional. By default, telemetry data is dropped. Configure the metrics, logs, and traces arguments accordingly to send telemetry data to other components.

passthrough block

The passthrough block configures which metric types should be passed through instead of being aggregated.

The following attributes are supported:

debug_metrics block

The debug_metrics block configures the metrics that this component generates to monitor its state.

The following arguments are supported:

disable_high_cardinality_metrics is the Grafana Alloy equivalent to the telemetry.disableHighCardinalityMetrics feature gate in the OpenTelemetry Collector. It removes attributes that could cause high cardinality metrics. For example, attributes with IP addresses and port numbers in metrics about HTTP and gRPC connections are removed.

level is the Alloy equivalent to the telemetry.metrics.level feature gate in the OpenTelemetry Collector. Possible values are "none", "basic", "normal" and "detailed".

Exported fields

The following fields are exported and can be referenced by other components:

input accepts otelcol.Consumer data for metrics.

Component health

otelcol.processor.interval is only reported as unhealthy if given an invalid configuration.

Debug information

otelcol.processor.interval does not expose any component-specific debug information.

Example

This example receives OTLP metrics and aggregates them for 30s before sending to the next exporter.

alloy Copy

otelcol.receiver.otlp "default" {
  grpc { ... }
  http { ... }

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

otelcol.processor.interval "default" {
  interval = "30s"
  output {
    metrics = [otelcol.exporter.otlphttp.grafana_cloud.input]
  }
}

otelcol.exporter.otlphttp "grafana_cloud" {
  client {
    endpoint = "https://otlp-gateway-prod-gb-south-0.grafana.net/otlp"
    auth     = otelcol.auth.basic.grafana_cloud.handler
  }
}

otelcol.auth.basic "grafana_cloud" {
  username = env("GRAFANA_CLOUD_USERNAME")
  password = env("GRAFANA_CLOUD_API_KEY")
}

The processor immediately passes the following metric to the next processor in the chain because it is a Delta metric.

At the next interval (15s by default), the processor passed the following metrics to the next processor in the chain.

Compatible components

otelcol.processor.interval can accept arguments from the following components:

• Components that export OpenTelemetry otelcol.Consumer

otelcol.processor.interval has exports that can be consumed by the following components:

• Components that consume OpenTelemetry otelcol.Consumer