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Set up a Collector

For production observability, Grafana Alloy, an OpenTelemetry Collector distribution, offers the following benefits:

  1. Cost control: Grafana Alloy aggregates and drops telemetry data to only send relevant data and reduce costs.
  2. Scalability and reliability: An OpenTelemetry Collector buffers and retries data so you don’t lose data during connection issues.
  3. Flexibility: Grafana Alloy simplifies configuration and manages complex data pipelines through enrichment, transformation, redaction, and routing.

Application Observability - Architecture

Grafana Labs recommends and supports Grafana Alloy, a vendor-neutral distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector, that gives you seamless correlation between Application and Infrastructure observability.

Grafana Alloy

Grafana Labs maintains Grafana Alloy, and packages various upstream OpenTelemetry Collector components and Prometheus exporters, to provide stability, support, and an integrated experience with Grafana Application Observability and other Grafana products.

Consult the Grafana Alloy documentation for the recommended and supported way to send telemetry data for infrastructure and applications to Grafana Cloud.

Grafana Alloy for Kubernetes

If you deploy your application in Kubernetes, it’s recommended to use the Grafana Kubernetes Monitoring helm chart and take advantage of both Application Observability and Kubernetes Monitoring solutions.

Consult the Kubernetes Monitoring with Grafana Alloy documentation for more information.

OpenTelemetry Collector

The OpenTelemetry project maintainers and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation maintain the OpenTelemetry Collector.

You can use the OpenTelemetry Collector with Application Observability. Consult the Grafana OpenTelemetry Collector documentation to use the upstream community supported OpenTelemetry Collector to send telemetry data to Grafana Cloud.

Kubernetes OpenTelemetry Operator

If you use the upstream community supported OpenTelemetry Collector and deploy your application in Kubernetes, you can use the OpenTelemetry Operator to instrument your application and send telemetry data to Grafana Cloud without modifying your services.