Unified Telemetry Collection
Replace multiple agents with a single Alloy binary for centralized collection of logs, metrics, and traces.
Observabilité · Courses
Alloy: From Discovery to Expertise
Complete training on Grafana Alloy, from discovery to expertise.
At your pace, through practice.By the end of this course you will be able to
- Write Alloy pipelines for metrics, logs, traces and profiles
- Structure configuration with modules and manage secrets
- Deploy Alloy as a cluster on Kubernetes with Helm
- Monitor Alloy itself
LEARNING PATH
Course curriculum
0Course Overview1 lesson
1Introduction and Architecture9 lessons
Understand the fundamental concepts of Grafana Alloy.
- What is Grafana Alloy?Lesson · ⏱ 19 min
- The concept of 'Programmable Pipelines'Article · ⏱ 3 min
- Internal ArchitectureArticle · ⏱ 3 min
- InstallationArticle · ⏱ 3 min
- Alloy, Grafana Agent and PromtailArticle · ⏱ 6 min
- Alloy or OpenTelemetry Collector?Article · ⏱ 6 min
- Alloy or Dynatrace ActiveGate?Article · ⏱ 9 min
- Lab: Install Alloy with Docker and explore its UIHands-on lab · ⏱ 25 min · Level 1/5
- OpenTelemetry Collector, Grafana Alloy and BindplaneArticle · ⏱ 9 min
2Syntax and Configuration (Alloy Language)7 lessons
Master the declarative syntax and configurations.
- Configuration BlocksLesson · ⏱ 19 min
- River vs HCLArticle · ⏱ 3 min
- Variables and FunctionsArticle · ⏱ 3 min
- Secrets ManagementLesson · ⏱ 19 min
- Alloy ObservabilityArticle · ⏱ 13 min
- Alloy's user interfaceArticle · ⏱ 5 min
- Lab: First pipeline - system metrics and local logsHands-on lab · ⏱ 45 min · Level 2/5
3Metrics Collection (Prometheus & Ecosystem)5 lessons
4Log Management (Loki)5 lessons
5Traces (Tempo)3 lessons
Ingestion and transformation of traces.
6Continuous Profiling (Pyroscope)3 lessons
7Cluster Mode2 lessons
High availability and load balancing.
8Advanced Deployment2 lessons
9Best practices and final project3 lessons
Consolidate what you learned, browse the component reference and complete a capstone project.
LEARN BY DOING
Use cases & applications
OTLP Data Transformation
Receive, filter, modify, and route OpenTelemetry data to various observability databases.
Kubernetes Dynamic Discovery
Automatically discover and scrape pods and services dynamically deployed in a Kubernetes cluster.
Continuous Profiling
Collect application performance profiles (via Pyroscope) continuously to quickly identify bottlenecks.
Recommended prerequisites
What next?
Frequently asked questions
What is Grafana Alloy?
It is an open-source, vendor-neutral telemetry collector designed to replace Grafana Agent. It is OpenTelemetry (OTel) compatible.
Does Alloy replace Promtail and other agents?
Yes, Alloy combines the features of Promtail and Grafana Agent and includes native support for OpenTelemetry.
What configuration language does Alloy use?
Alloy uses a declarative syntax based on River (similar to Terraform's HCL) which simplifies pipeline creation.
Can Alloy be used for OpenTelemetry?
Absolutely, Alloy offers full native support for receiving, processing, and exporting data (Traces, Logs, Metrics) via the OTLP protocol.