Managing observability pipelines at scale can be complex and cumbersome. Grafana Alloy, a new OpenTelemetry collector distribution released in 2024, aims to simplify this challenge with versatile configuration options, vault integration, and reusable telemetry processing modules—making OpenTelemetry adoption easier than ever.

The speaker will provide an overview of the idea and principles behind Open Telemetry before introducing Grafana Alloy to the audience, focusing on its added features and differences compared to the OTel collector.

To show the audience how Grafana Alloy can be used in a real-world scenario, the speaker will present a live demonstration on how to integrate Grafana Alloy with the official OTel Demo application, showcasing how to collect, parse, and forward application and infrastructure telemetry in various ways.

Attendees can expect a thorough discussion of Alloy's strengths (and weaknesses), as well as a first impression of what using Alloy can look like.