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Section 2 · Send metrics

How OTLP metrics reach Grafana Cloud Metrics

Estimated time: 1 min

OpenTelemetry metrics

The Grafana Cloud OTLP endpoint accepts OpenTelemetry metrics, logs, and traces. OTLP metrics are routed into Grafana Cloud Metrics.

Grafana Alloy is the Grafana Labs supported distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector. Alloy is the recommended production collector, however other OpenTelemetry Collector distributions can send to the same endpoint with additional setup.

An SDK can send OTLP directly for non-production use, or when you cannot deploy a collector.

An OpenTelemetry Collector sends OTLP metrics to Grafana Cloud Metrics

Considerations

  • You send OTLP as-is. Grafana converts . and - in metric and label names to _.
  • Extra describing fields on the metric (resource attributes) are stored on a metric named target_info.
  • The same endpoint accepts logs and traces. This journey does not walk through traces.

Documentation