Documentation Grafana Alloy Release notes

Release notes for Grafana Alloy

The release notes provide information about deprecations and breaking changes in Grafana Alloy.

For a complete list of changes to Grafana Alloy, with links to pull requests and related issues when available, refer to the Changelog.

v1.6

Breaking change: The topics argument in the component loki.source.kafka does not use regex by default anymore

A bug in loki.source.kafka caused the component to treat all topics as regular expressions. For example, setting the topic value to “telemetry” would match any topic containing the substring “telemetry”. With the fix introduced in this version, topic values are now treated as exact matches by default. Regular expression matching is still supported by prefixing a topic with “^”, allowing it to match multiple topics.

Breaking change: Change decision precedence in otelcol.processor.tail_sampling when using and_sub_policy and invert_match

Alloy v1.5 upgraded to OpenTelemetry Collector v0.104.0, which included a fix to the tail sampling processor:

Previously if the decision from a policy evaluation was NotSampled or InvertNotSampled it would return a NotSampled decision regardless, effectively downgrading the result. This was breaking the documented behaviour that inverted decisions should take precedence over all others.

The “documented behavior” which the above quote is referring to is in the processor documentation:

Each policy will result in a decision, and the processor will evaluate them to make a final decision:

• When there’s an “inverted not sample” decision, the trace is not sampled;
• When there’s a “sample” decision, the trace is sampled;
• When there’s a “inverted sample” decision and no “not sample” decisions, the trace is sampled;
• In all other cases, the trace is NOT sampled

An “inverted” decision is the one made based on the “invert_match” attribute, such as the one from the string, numeric or boolean tag policy.

However, in OpenTelemetry Collector v0.116.0 this fix was reverted:

Reverts #33671, allowing for composite policies to specify inverted clauses in conjunction with other policies. This is a change bringing the previous state into place, breaking users who rely on what was introduced as part of #33671.

v1.5

Breaking change: Change default value of max_streams in otelcol.processor.deltatocumulative

The default value was changed from 0 to 9223372036854775807 (max int).

Breaking change: Change default value of namespace in otelcol.connector.spanmetrics

The default value was changed from "" to "traces.span.metrics".

Breaking change: The component otelcol.exporter.logging has been removed in favor of otelcol.exporter.debug

Both components are very similar. More information can be found in the announcement issue.

Breaking change: Change default value of revision in import.git

The default value was changed from "HEAD" to "main". Setting the revision to "HEAD", "FETCH_HEAD", "ORIG_HEAD", "MERGE_HEAD" or "CHERRY_PICK_HEAD" is no longer allowed.

v1.4

Breaking change: Some debug metrics for otelcol components have changed

For example, otelcol.exporter.otlp’s exporter_sent_spans_ratio_total metric is now otelcol_exporter_sent_spans_total. You may need to change your dashboard and alert settings to reference the new metrics. Refer to each component’s documentation page for more information.

Breaking change: The convert_sum_to_gauge and convert_gauge_to_sum functions in otelcol.processor.transform change context

The convert_sum_to_gauge and convert_gauge_to_sum functions must now be used in the metric context rather than in the datapoint context. This is due to a change upstream.

Breaking change: Renamed metrics in beyla.ebpf

process.cpu.state is renamed to cpu.mode and beyla_build_info is renamed to beyla_internal_build_info.

v1.3

Breaking change: remotecfg block updated argument name from metadata to attributes

The remotecfg block has an updated argument name from metadata to attributes.

v1.2

Breaking change: remotecfg block updated for Agent rename

The remotecfg block has been updated to use alloy-remote-config over agent-remote-config. This change aligns remotecfg API terminology with Alloy and includes updated endpoints.