Install Grafana Alloy

The Grafana Alloy installation process varies by operating system, and you can access the installation commands directly from Grafana Cloud. These commands are pre-configured with your stack-specific connection details, making the setup process straightforward.

Alloy should be installed on a machine with network access to your Kafka brokers’ JMX ports (typically port 9999 or as configured). This can be on one of the Kafka broker machines themselves, or on a dedicated monitoring host with network connectivity to all brokers in your cluster.

To install Grafana Alloy, complete the following steps:

1. In Grafana Cloud, select Connections > Add new connection.
2. Search for Kafka and select the Kafka integration.
3. Click Install integration.
4. In the Install Grafana Alloy section, select your operating system (Linux, macOS, Windows, or Docker).
5. Copy the installation command provided for your platform.
6. On the machine where you want to collect Kafka metrics, open a terminal with administrator or root privileges.
7. Paste and run the installation command.
8. Wait for the installation to complete.

The installation completes successfully and displays a confirmation message. The Alloy service starts automatically and runs in the background.

In the next milestone, you configure the JMX exporter to expose Kafka broker metrics.