Grafana Alloy on Grafana Labs

Migrate to Alloy

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:59:14 +0000

Migrate to Alloy

Grafana Labs has provided tools and migration documentation to assist you in migrating to Grafana Alloy.

Read more about why we recommend migrating to Grafana Alloy.

This section provides links to documentation for how to migrate to Alloy.

Set up Alloy to remote-write to Tempo

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:59:14 +0000

Set up Alloy to remote-write to Tempo

This section uses a Grafana Alloy Helm chart deployment to send traces to Tempo.

To do this, you need to create a configuration that can be used by Alloy to receive and export traces in OTLP protobuf format.

Create a new values.yaml file which we’ll use as part of the Alloy install.

Edit the values.yaml file and add the following configuration to it:

alloy:
  extraPorts:
    - name: otlp-grpc
      port: 4317
      targetPort: 4317
      protocol: TCP
  configMap:
    create: true
    content: |-
      // Creates a receiver for OTLP gRPC.
      // You can easily add receivers for other protocols by using the correct component
      // from the reference list at: https://grafana.com/docs/alloy/latest/reference/components/
      otelcol.receiver.otlp "otlp_receiver" {
        // Listen on all available bindable addresses on port 4317 (which is the
        // default OTLP gRPC port) for the OTLP protocol.
        grpc {
          endpoint = "0.0.0.0:4317"
        }

        // Output straight to the OTLP gRPC exporter. We would usually do some processing
        // first, most likely batch processing, but for this example we pass it straight
        // through.
        output {
          traces = [
            otelcol.exporter.otlp.tempo.input,
          ]
        }
      }

      // Define an OTLP gRPC exporter to send all received traces to GET.
      // The unique label 'tempo' is added to uniquely identify this exporter.
      otelcol.exporter.otlp "tempo" {
          // Define the client for exporting.
          client {
              // Send to the locally running Tempo instance, on port 4317 (OTLP gRPC).
              endpoint = "http://tempo-cluster-distributor.tempo.svc.cluster.local:4317"
              // Disable TLS for OTLP remote write.
              tls {
                  // The connection is insecure.
                  insecure = true
                  // Do not verify TLS certificates when connecting.
                  insecure_skip_verify = true
              }
          }
      }

Ensure that you use the specific namespace you’ve installed Tempo in for the OTLP exporter. In the line:

endpoint = "http://tempo-cluster-distributor.tempo.svc.cluster.local:3100"

change tempo to reference the namespace where Tempo is installed, for example: http://tempo-cluster-distributor.my-tempo-namespaces.svc.cluster.local:3100.

Deploy Alloy using Helm:
Bash
```
helm install -f values.yaml grafana-alloy grafana/alloy
```
If you deploy Alloy into a specific namespace, create the namespace first and specify it to Helm by appending --namespace=<grafana-alloy-namespace> to the end of the command.

Automatic logging: Trace discovery through logs

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:59:14 +0000

Automatic logging: Trace discovery through logs

Running instrumented distributed systems is a very powerful way to gain understanding over a system, but it brings its own challenges. One of them is discovering which traces exist.

Using the span logs connector, you can use Alloy to perform automatic logging.

In the beginning of Tempo, querying for a trace was only possible if you knew the ID of the trace you were looking for. One solution was automatic logging. Automatic logging provides an easy and fast way of discovering trace IDs through log messages. Well-formatted log lines are written to a logs exporter for each span, root, or process that passes through the tracing pipeline. This allows for automatically building a mechanism for trace discovery. On top of that, you can also get metrics from traces using a logs source, and allow quickly jumping from a log message to the trace view in Grafana.

While this approach is useful, it isn’t as powerful as TraceQL. If you are here because you know you want to log the trace ID, to enable jumping from logs to traces, then read on.

If you want to query the system directly, read the TraceQL documentation.

Configuration

For high throughput systems, logging for every span may generate too much volume. In such cases, logging per root span or process is recommended.

Automatic logging searches for a given set of span or resource attributes in the spans and logs them as key-value pairs. This allows searching by those key-value pairs in Loki.

Before you begin

To configure automatic logging, you need to configure the otelcol.connector.spanlogs connector with appropriate options.

To see all the available configuration options, refer to the otelcol.connector.spanlogs components reference.

This simple example logs trace roots before exporting them to the Grafana OTLP gateway, and is a good way to get started using automatic logging:

otelcol.receiver.otlp "default" {
  grpc {}
  http {}

  output {
    traces = [otelcol.connector.spanlogs.default.input]
  }
}

otelcol.connector.spanlogs "default" {
  roots = true

  output {
    logs = [otelcol.exporter.otlp.default.input]
  }
}

otelcol.exporter.otlp "default" {
  client {
    endpoint = env("OTLP_ENDPOINT")
  }
}

This example logs all trace roots, adding the http.method and http.target attributes to the log line, then pushes logs to a local Loki instance:

otelcol.receiver.otlp "default" {
  grpc {}
  http {}

  output {
    traces = [otelcol.connector.spanlogs.default.input]
  }
}

otelcol.connector.spanlogs "default" {
  roots           = true
  span_attributes = ["http.method", "http.target"]

  output {
    logs = [otelcol.exporter.loki.default.input]
  }
}

otelcol.exporter.loki "default" {
  forward_to = [loki.write.local.receiver]
}

loki.write "local" {
  endpoint {
    url = "loki:3100"
  }
}

Grafana Alloy on Grafana Labs

Migrate to Alloy

Migrate to Alloy

Set up Alloy to remote-write to Tempo

Set up Alloy to remote-write to Tempo

Automatic logging: Trace discovery through logs

Automatic logging: Trace discovery through logs

Configuration

Before you begin

Examples