How telemetry enters Alloy

Alloy gathers telemetry data by scraping, receiving pushed data, or tailing a source.

Scrape

Alloy opens a scheduled connection to a target and requests the current data. A common example is scraping Prometheus endpoints to pull metrics.

Push

Alloy opens a listener and passively waits for the source to send data. A common example is receiving OpenTelemetry Protocol, or OTLP, data that an application pushes to Alloy.

Tail

Alloy watches a file on disk for new appended content and reads it incrementally. A common example is reading new lines in a log file as they are written.

Which of these you use depends on the signal and the source. Alloy can also discover endpoints automatically and integrate with specialized systems.