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Section 1 · Journey overview

What Alloy is and the problem one collector for metrics, logs, traces, and profiles solves

Estimated time: 1 min

What is Grafana Alloy

Grafana Alloy is an open source telemetry collector that simplifies how you gather and send telemetry. Alloy is based on the OpenTelemetry Collector, an open source collector that receives, processes, and sends telemetry. Alloy also includes built-in support for Prometheus, a system for collecting metrics, and can send data to Loki (logs), Pyroscope (profiles), and other telemetry backends.

Instead of running a separate collector for each signal type, Alloy collects all four in one tool:

  • Metrics: numeric measurements collected over time that give a high-level picture of system state
  • Logs: timestamped text records of discrete events
  • Traces: a map of a single request as it moves through distributed services
  • Profiles: code-level data that shows which functions consume CPU and memory

Where your data can go

Once Alloy has collected your telemetry, you choose where to send it. For example:

  • Grafana Cloud
  • A self-managed Grafana stack
  • Other telemetry platforms