Caution
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.
Important: This documentation is about an older version. It's relevant only to the release noted, many of the features and functions have been updated or replaced. Please view the current version.
Introduction to Grafana Agent
Grafana Agent is a flexible, high performance, vendor-neutral telemetry collector. It’s fully compatible with the most popular open source observability standards such as OpenTelemetry (OTel) and Prometheus.
Grafana Agent is available in three different variants:
- Static mode: The original Grafana Agent.
- Static mode Kubernetes operator: The Kubernetes operator for Static mode.
- Flow mode: The new, component-based Grafana Agent.
Stability
| Project | Stability |
|---|---|
| Static mode | Stable |
| Static mode Kubernetes operator | Beta |
| Flow mode | Stable |
Choose which variant of Grafana Agent to run
NOTE: You don’t have to pick just one variant; it’s possible to mix-and-match installations of Grafana Agent.
Compare variants
Each variant of Grafana Agent provides a different level of functionality. The following tables compare Grafana Agent Flow mode with Static mode, Operator, OpenTelemetry, and Prometheus.
Core telemetry
| Grafana Agent Flow mode | Grafana Agent Static mode | Grafana Agent Operator | OpenTelemetry Collector | Prometheus Agent mode | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Metrics | Prometheus, OTel | Prometheus | Prometheus | OTel | Prometheus |
| Logs | Loki, OTel | Loki | Loki | OTel | No |
| Traces | OTel | OTel | OTel | OTel | No |
| Profiles | Pyroscope | No | No | Planned | No |
OSS features
| Grafana Agent Flow mode | Grafana Agent Static mode | Grafana Agent Operator | OpenTelemetry Collector | Prometheus Agent mode | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kubernetes native | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| Clustering | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Prometheus rules | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Native Vault support | Yes | No | No | No | No |
Grafana Cloud solutions
| Grafana Agent Flow mode | Grafana Agent Static mode | Grafana Agent Operator | OpenTelemetry Collector | Prometheus Agent mode | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Official vendor support | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| Cloud integrations | Some | Yes | Some | No | No |
| Kubernetes monitoring | Yes | Yes, custom | Yes | No | Yes, custom |
| Application observability | Yes | No | No | Yes | No |
Static mode
Static mode is the original variant of Grafana Agent, introduced on March 3, 2020. Static mode is the most mature variant of Grafana Agent.
You should run Static mode when:
Maturity: You need to use the most mature version of Grafana Agent.
Grafana Cloud integrations: You need to use Grafana Agent with Grafana Cloud integrations.
Static mode Kubernetes operator
Note
Grafana Agent version 0.37 and newer provides Prometheus Operator compatibility in Flow mode. You should use Grafana Agent Flow mode for all new Grafana Agent deployments.
The Static mode Kubernetes operator is a variant of Grafana Agent introduced on June 17, 2021. It’s currently in beta.
The Static mode Kubernetes operator provides compatibility with Prometheus Operator, allowing static mode to support resources from Prometheus Operator, such as ServiceMonitors, PodMonitors, and Probes.
You should run the Static mode Kubernetes operator when:
- Prometheus Operator compatibility: You need to be able to consume ServiceMonitors, PodMonitors, and Probes from the Prometheus Operator project for collecting Prometheus metrics.
Flow mode
Flow mode is a stable variant of Grafana Agent, introduced on September 29, 2022.
Grafana Agent Flow mode focuses on vendor neutrality, ease-of-use, improved debugging, and ability to adapt to the needs of power users by adopting a configuration-as-code model.
You should run Flow mode when:
You need functionality unique to Flow mode:
Improved debugging: You need to more easily debug configuration issues using a UI.
Full OpenTelemetry support: Support for collecting OpenTelemetry metrics, logs, and traces.
PrometheusRule support: Support for the PrometheusRule resource from the Prometheus Operator project for configuring Grafana Mimir.
Ecosystem transformation: You need to be able to convert Prometheus and Loki pipelines to and from OpenTelmetry Collector pipelines.
Grafana Pyroscope support: Support for collecting profiles for Grafana Pyroscope.
BoringCrypto
BoringCrypto is an EXPERIMENTAL feature for building Grafana Agent binaries and images with BoringCrypto enabled. Builds and Docker images for Linux arm64/amd64 are made available.
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