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Stage 2, Send: a collector moves your spans

Stage 2, Send: a collector moves your spans

Your instrumented application doesn’t write straight to storage. The spans first pass through a piece of software that receives them and forwards them on to a backend. That piece is a collector.

Grafana’s collector is Grafana Alloy. Alloy receives the spans your application emits and forwards them to a tracing backend. It speaks OTLP (OpenTelemetry Protocol), the standard format for sending telemetry data.

Traces add up fast

Tracing produces a higher volume of data than metrics. A single request can create dozens or hundreds of spans, and that volume grows with your traffic, so traces are one of the easiest signals to over-ingest. To keep the volume, and the cost, manageable, you keep a representative subset of traces instead of all of them, a practice called sampling. Choosing a sampling strategy is part of setup, covered in the setup journey.

Script

Your instrumented application doesn’t write straight to storage. The spans first pass through a piece of software that catches them and forwards them onward, and that piece is a collector.

Grafana’s collector is Grafana Alloy. Alloy receives the spans your application emits and sends them to a tracing backend, speaking OTLP, the standard format for shipping telemetry.

Here’s the catch that surprises people. Tracing produces a higher volume of data than metrics. A single request can spin up dozens or hundreds of spans, and that grows with every bit of traffic, which makes traces one of the easiest signals to over-ingest.

So instead of keeping every trace, you keep a representative subset, a practice called sampling. Picking a sampling strategy is a setup decision, covered in the setup journey.

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