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Understand what Grafana Alloy is and when it makes sense to use it.

Estimated time: 1 min

The value of Grafana Alloy

Grafana Alloy is an open source telemetry collector that simplifies how you gather and send observability data. It’s an OpenTelemetry Collector distribution with built-in Prometheus pipelines and native support for backends such as Loki and Pyroscope.

Instead of running separate collectors for each signal type, Alloy collects metrics, logs, traces, and profiles in one tool. You can send data to Grafana Cloud, a self-managed Grafana stack, or other observability platforms.

The following diagram shows Alloy in the collection layer, between your data sources and storage backends.

Diagram showing how Alloy collects telemetry signals and forwards them to databases and other systems

Alloy is often a strong fit when you need to:

  • Collect metrics, logs, traces, and profiles with one collector instead of several
  • Use Prometheus and OpenTelemetry together without choosing only one
  • Stay vendor-neutral by sending data to Grafana Cloud, a self-managed Grafana stack, Prometheus-compatible databases, or OpenTelemetry-compatible backends
  • Start with a single instance and grow into clustering and remote configuration as your needs expand

In the next milestone, you learn how Alloy fits in an observability architecture and how its engines relate.

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