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Section 2 · Send metrics

Sending OpenTelemetry metrics to Grafana Cloud

Estimated time: 1 min

OpenTelemetry metrics via OTLP

OpenTelemetry is an open source observability framework that provides a standard way to generate, collect, and export telemetry data.

OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) is the native way to send OpenTelemetry metrics to Grafana Cloud through its OTLP endpoint, which routes them into Grafana Cloud Metrics. Teams already using OpenTelemetry SDKs or the OpenTelemetry Collector send their metrics this way.

If you’re setting up a collector for the first time, Grafana Alloy is Grafana’s OpenTelemetry Collector distribution and can export OTLP to Grafana Cloud. This journey covers teams already running a standard OpenTelemetry Collector.

OpenTelemetry metrics flow

Considerations

  • You send OTLP as-is; Grafana Cloud maps it to Prometheus on ingestion, so you don’t convert formats yourself.
  • One protocol for metrics, logs, and traces.
  • Requires an OTLP-compatible source (an OpenTelemetry SDK or Collector).
  • On ingestion, OTLP names are transformed: dots and dashes in metric and label names become underscores, and some resource attributes are stored on the target_info metric.

Documentation