Grafana Alloy is an open-source solution that combines log collection, traces, and metrics scraping in a single tool. It provides a streamlined solution while maintaining full compatibility with Promtail, Prometheus Agent, OpenTelemetry, and many other standards—making it a flexible Swiss Army knife for data collection.

In a multi-cluster environment, Alloy can replace both Promtail and Prometheus for metrics forwarding. Since this eliminates the need for a full Prometheus installation for scraping, it simplifies deployment and reduces cluster resource usage.

For single-cluster environments where Loki and Prometheus services run in the same cluster, we maintain direct use of Promtail and Prometheus without Alloy.