Journey overview
Grafana Alloy is an open source telemetry collector. Telemetry is the data your systems produce about how they are running: metrics, logs, traces, and profiles. Observability means understanding how systems are running by examining that telemetry. A collector gathers telemetry and forwards it to wherever you store and view it.
This journey helps understand what Alloy is and how it works across all four signals. You learn to read an Alloy configuration file, then choose the signal you want to collect and open its collection docs to go deeper.
What this journey covers
- What Alloy is and when to use it: the problems one collector for metrics, logs, traces, and profiles solves
- How Alloy works: how telemetry enters Alloy, the collect, transform, and send jobs, and the layer Alloy runs in
- Components and pipelines: how the building blocks of an Alloy configuration connect so data flows from source to destination
- Reading a configuration file: the parts of an Alloy configuration, and how to trace how those parts connect
- Alloy in Grafana Cloud: where you deploy Alloy and manage many collectors from one place
- Choose a signal next: open collection docs for metrics, logs, traces, or profiles
What you need
This journey is a guided orientation, not a full install-and-configure workshop. No prior Alloy experience is assumed, and you don’t need Alloy installed on a host.
A Grafana Cloud account is optional. If you want to open the menus named in the each section, you can create a free account. Basic familiarity with the Grafana Cloud UI helps for that look-around, but you can complete the journey without it.