When to use Alloy

Alloy is often a strong fit when you need to:

• Collect several signals with one tool: gather metrics, logs, traces, and profiles with one collector instead of several
• Use Prometheus and OpenTelemetry together: work with both without having to choose only one
• Stay vendor-neutral: send data to Grafana Cloud, a self-managed Grafana stack, or other backends you choose
• Start small and grow: start with one Alloy instance, then run several instances together or update their configuration from one central place as you scale

Prometheus and OpenTelemetry

Prometheus and OpenTelemetry are two standards for collecting telemetry. Some tools support one or the other. Because Alloy supports both, you can bring in data from either without running a second collector or committing to a single ecosystem.