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The Alloy OpenTelemetry Engine

Grafana Alloy combines the Prometheus-native, production-grade collection features of Alloy with the broad ecosystem and standards of OpenTelemetry. The Alloy OpenTelemetry Engine is a bundled OpenTelemetry Collector distribution embedded within Alloy that lets you run Alloy as a fully compatible OTel Collector while retaining access to all Alloy features and integrations.

EXPERIMENTAL: OTel Engine is an experimental feature. Experimental features are subject to frequent breaking changes, and may be removed with no equivalent replacement.

To maintain full compatibility of the OTel Engine with the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector and expose a compatible command line interface, the OTel Engine isn’t hidden behind a stability flag.

Make sure that you understand the risks involved before using an experimental feature in your production environments.

Terminology

Alloy supports two runtime engines and an extension:

  • Default Engine: The default Alloy runtime and configuration syntax. This remains the default, stable experience with backward compatibility guarantees for Alloy users.

  • OTel Engine: The standard OpenTelemetry Collector runtime embedded within Alloy. It uses upstream collector YAML configuration for pipelines and components.

  • Alloy Engine extension: An OpenTelemetry Collector extension that allows you to run both the Default Engine and the OTel Engine in parallel.

Included components

The OTel Engine bundle includes:

  • Standard components from the OpenTelemetry Collector core
  • A curated selection of components from contributor repositories
  • The alloyengine extension

The following sections list all included components:

To view the full list of components and their versions, refer to the OpenTelemetry Collector Builder manifest.

Next steps