Journey overview on Grafana Labs

Journey overview

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:33:11 -0700

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.

What is Grafana Alloy

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 09:40:11 -0500

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

When to use Alloy

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 09:40:11 -0500

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.