Alloy in action: Build telemetry pipelines with OpenTelemetry and Prometheus

Whether you’re observing applications, infrastructure, or both, Alloy enables you to collect, process, and export telemetry so you can scale and future-proof your observability strategy. 

In this hands-on lab, you’ll build telemetry pipelines with Alloy — an open source distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector with built-in Prometheus pipelines — from start to finish. Using Alloy, you’ll receive, transform, and export telemetry from a sample application to observability backends within the Grafana LGTM stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics).

By the end of three hours, you will:

• Understand core Alloy components and how they fit together
• Use Alloy’s configuration language
• Configure Prometheus and OpenTelemetry pipelines within Alloy
• Collect, process, and export telemetry data to Grafana observability backends
• Troubleshoot pipelines using the debug UI
• Visualize telemetry data using Grafana dashboards

Requirements:

• Laptop with WiFi access
• Linux/MacOS/WSL2
• Docker
• Docker compose
• Administrator or sudo access to build and run Docker containers

Some familiarity with Alloy, and with general telemetry collection concepts like scraping or remote_writing, is beneficial but not required.

This session is tailored for developers and SREs.