What's New & Next in Grafana Alloy: The Official OpenTelemetry Collector Distribution

Grafana Alloy is now an official OpenTelemetry Collector distribution — with a native OTel YAML engine, a dual-engine architecture, and Fleet Management support for 360,000+ active collectors across 7,000+ organizations.

In this GrafanaCON talk, Alloy engineers Bejal and Marko walk through the new OTel engine: what it is, why Grafana built it, and how it runs alongside Alloy's existing default engine in a single deployment. A live demo shows both engines in parallel — Prometheus-native pipelines in the default engine, OTLP-based trace collection in the OTel engine — exactly as Grafana runs it internally to process 12 billion spans in 24 hours. Marko then introduces Fleet Management's OpAMP support, which lets you remotely push configuration to any OpenTelemetry Collector (not just Alloy) from a single control plane, at no charge. The OTel engine is available now in experimental status; OTel engine remote management via Fleet Management is in private preview.

0:00 Introduction
1:05 Why Alloy Is Becoming an Official OTel Distribution
2:31 How the OTel Engine Works
10:54 Live Demo: Both Engines Running Side by Side
13:42 Production Proof: 12 Billion Spans in 24 Hours
16:28 Managing Collectors at Scale with Fleet Management
19:30 Fleet Management Live Demo
23:35 What's Next

Links/resources:
Alloy Github: https://github.com/grafana/alloy
Read the documentation: https://grafana.com/docs/alloy/latest/?src=yt
Get started with the Grafana Cloud forever-free tier: https://grafana.com/g/cloud
Have a question? Ask Grot, your AI helper: https://grafana.com/grot/
Reach out in our community forums: https://gra.fan/communityyf

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#Grafana #Observability #Alloy #OpenTelemetry #YAML