# Grafana Alloy

> Apache-2.0 OpenTelemetry Collector distribution

**Category:** Observability  
**Pricing:** open-source  
**URL:** https://grafana.com/oss/alloy  
**GitHub:** https://github.com/grafana/alloy  
**Added:** 2026-10-18

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## The Hook

Grafana Alloy is an OpenTelemetry Collector distribution with built-in Prometheus pipelines that collects metrics, logs, traces and profiles and sends them to Grafana's stack or any compatible backend.

## What's Good

Apache-2.0 (grafana/alloy), release v1.20.1 (2026-09-28), the successor to Grafana Agent. Pipelines are written in an expression-based config language, it bundles dozens of OTel Collector components plus Prometheus, Loki and Pyroscope integrations, interacts with Kubernetes resources directly, shares pipelines as modules and distributes work across a cluster of Alloy instances. ★~3.6k.

## The Catch

The Alloy config syntax is its own language, so it is another thing to learn on top of OTel YAML. It is tuned for Grafana backends; for a pure OTel setup, the upstream Collector may be simpler. Migrating from Grafana Agent or Promtail takes conversion work.

## Verdict

The obvious collector if you run Grafana's LGTM stack.
