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Grafana Alloy is the new name for our distribution of the OTel collector. Grafana Agent has been deprecated and is in Long-Term Support (LTS) through October 31, 2025. Grafana Agent will reach an End-of-Life (EOL) on November 1, 2025. Read more about why we recommend migrating to Grafana Alloy.

This is documentation for the next version of Agent. For the latest stable release, go to the latest version.

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Distribute Prometheus metrics scrape load

A good predictor for the size of an Grafana Agent Flow deployment is the number of Prometheus targets each Grafana Agent scrapes. Clustering with target auto-distribution allows a fleet of Grafana Agents to work together to dynamically distribute their scrape load, providing high-availability.

Before you begin

Steps

To distribute Prometheus metrics scrape load with clustering:

  1. Add the following block to all prometheus.scrape components, which should use auto-distribution:

    river
    clustering {
      enabled = true
    }
  2. Restart or reload Grafana Agents for them to use the new configuration.

  3. Validate that auto-distribution is functioning:

    1. Using the Grafana Agent UI on each Grafana Agent, navigate to the details page for one of the prometheus.scrape components you modified.

    2. Compare the Debug Info sections between two different Grafana Agent to ensure that they’re not scraping the same sets of targets.