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Send traces using Alloy
16 min
Milestone 1
Case for observability
2 min
Milestone 2
Value of traces and Alloy
2 min
Milestone 3
Install Alloy
3 min
Milestone 4
Configure Alloy
2 min
Milestone 5
Inspect configuration
2 min
Milestone 6
Verify traces
2 min
Milestone 7
Destination reached!
1 min

Send traces to Grafana Cloud using Alloy

Welcome to the Grafana learning journey that shows you how to send traces to Grafana Cloud using Grafana Alloy. This journey provides a comprehensive guide for setting up distributed tracing collection and delivery using Alloy’s powerful telemetry collection capabilities.

Grafana Alloy is a vendor-neutral, OpenTelemetry-native telemetry collector that combines the strengths of the leading telemetry collectors. Alloy is designed to be flexible, performant, and scalable, making it the ideal choice for collecting and forwarding traces from your applications and infrastructure to Grafana Cloud.

Distributed tracing provides visibility into the flow of requests across multiple services in your application architecture. With Alloy, you can efficiently collect trace data from various sources and send it to Grafana Cloud for analysis, troubleshooting, and performance optimization.

The image below shows an exploration of tracing data using Grafana Traces Drilldown.

Example Traces Drilldown exploration showing request flows and service dependencies in Grafana Cloud

Here’s what to expect

When you complete this journey, you’ll be able to:

  • Understand the value of observability and distributed tracing for modern applications
  • Learn how Grafana Alloy enhances trace collection and delivery
  • Install and configure Grafana Alloy for trace collection
  • Choose and configure appropriate Alloy components for your environment
  • Inspect and validate your Alloy configuration
  • View and analyze traces in Grafana Cloud

Before you begin

Before you send traces to Grafana Cloud using Alloy, ensure that you have:

  • A Grafana Cloud account. To create an account, refer to Grafana Cloud.
  • Tracing data from your instrumented application or a sample application, like the OpenTelemetry example applications. This data can be collected by Grafana Alloy.
  • Access to the machine or environment where you plan to install Grafana Alloy (collected in the Install Grafana Alloy milestone).
  • Administrator permissions to install software and configure network access.
  • Basic familiarity with distributed tracing concepts and understanding what traces measure or represent helps you configure collection effectively.
  • For Linux, curl or wget installed
  • For macOS, Homebrew installed

Troubleshooting

If you get stuck, we’ve got your back! Where appropriate, troubleshooting information is just a click away.

More to explore

You might want to explore other capabilities not strictly on this path. Additional opportunities are provided where they make sense.

Are you ready?
Let's go!