What Alloy does

In the collection layer, Alloy performs three main jobs: it collects telemetry, transforms it, and sends it to your backends.

Collect telemetry data

Alloy gathers telemetry from sources in your infrastructure. In addition to scraping, receiving pushed data, or tailing a source, it can also:

• Automatically find the endpoints to collect from in Kubernetes or Docker (service discovery)
• Integrate with specialized systems such as databases and message queues

Transform and process data

Before data reaches storage, Alloy can reshape it. It can:

• Filter out unwanted data or redact secrets
• Add identifying fields, often called labels, and other context
• Standardize attribute names across services
• Keep only a subset of high-volume data (sampling)
• Convert between formats
• Route different data types to different destinations

Send to backends

Alloy delivers the processed telemetry to the systems you choose:

• Grafana Cloud
• Self-managed Grafana stack components such as Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope
• Prometheus-compatible databases
• OpenTelemetry-compatible backends

You can send to more than one destination from a single configuration.