---
title: "Inspect configuration and trace flow | Grafana Labs"
description: "Learn how to examine your Grafana Alloy configuration to understand trace processing and verify that traces are flowing correctly through the pipeline."
---

# Inspect configuration and trace flow

In this milestone, you examine your Grafana Alloy configuration to understand how traces flow through the pipeline and verify that trace processing is working correctly. Watch video ->

Your applications can send traces to Alloy, which forwards them to Grafana Cloud. The traces are delivered using the OpenTelemetry Protocol over HTTP to the configured endpoint.

Alloy provides a web interface that you can use to inspect the components used in your configuration and their status.

To inspect your configuration and verify trace flow, complete the following steps:

1. Restart Alloy to activate your configuration:
   
   LinuxmacOSWindowsDocker
   
   Linux macOS Windows Docker
   
   sh ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy
   
   ```sh
    sudo systemctl reload alloy
   ```
   
   sh ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy
   
   ```sh
   brew services restart grafana/grafana/alloy
   ```
   
   1. Open the Windows Services manager:
   2. Right click on the **Start Menu** and select **Run**.
   3. Type `services.msc` and click **OK**.
   4. Right click on the service called **Alloy**.
   5. Click on **All Tasks** > **Restart**.
   
   Restart Docker container named `grafana-alloy`:
   
   sh ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy
   
   ```sh
   docker restart grafana-alloy
   ```
2. Open your web browser and navigate to [`http://localhost:12345`](http://localhost:12345) to access the Alloy web interface.
   
   The web UI shows the status of each component, including the `otelcol.receiver.otlp` and `otelcol.exporter.otlp` components.
3. In the Alloy web UI, select `otelcol.auth.basic.grafanacloud` from the Components list.
   
   Under the **Arguments** section, verify that the `username` field matches your Grafana Cloud instance ID.
   
   If the username is incorrect, update it in your configuration file and restart the Alloy service.

In the next milestone, you view and analyze the traces in Grafana Cloud to complete your observability setup.