Ingesting logs to Loki using Alloy

Grafana Alloy is a versatile observability collector that can ingest logs in various formats and send them to Loki. We recommend Alloy as the primary method for sending logs to Loki, as it provides a more robust and feature-rich solution for building a highly scalable and reliable observability pipeline.

{{< figure src="/media/docs/alloy/flow-diagram-small-alloy.png" alt="Alloy flow diagram" >}}

Installing Alloy

To get started with Grafana Alloy and send logs to Loki, you need to install and configure Alloy. You can follow the Alloy documentation to install Alloy on your preferred platform.

Components of Alloy for logs

Alloy pipelines are built using components that perform specific functions. For logs these can be broken down into three categories:

Collector: These components collect/receive logs from various sources. This can be scraping logs from a file, receiving logs over HTTP, gRPC or ingesting logs from a message queue.
Transformer: These components can be used to manipulate logs before they are sent to a writer. This can be used to add additional metadata, filter logs, or batch logs before sending them to a writer.
Writer: These components send logs to the desired destination. Our documentation will focus on sending logs to Loki, but Alloy supports sending logs to various destinations.

Log components in Alloy

Here is a non-exhaustive list of components that can be used to build a log pipeline in Alloy. For a complete list of components, refer to the components list.

Type	Component
Collector	loki.source.api
Collector	loki.source.awsfirehose
Collector	loki.source.azure_event_hubs
Collector	loki.source.cloudflare
Collector	loki.source.docker
Collector	loki.source.file
Collector	loki.source.gcplog
Collector	loki.source.gelf
Collector	loki.source.heroku
Collector	loki.source.journal
Collector	loki.source.kafka
Collector	loki.source.kubernetes
Collector	loki.source.kubernetes_events
Collector	loki.source.podlogs
Collector	loki.source.syslog
Collector	loki.source.windowsevent
Collector	otelcol.receiver.loki
Transformer	loki.relabel
Transformer	loki.process
Writer	loki.write
Writer	otelcol.exporter.loki

Learning path

{{< docs/learning-paths title="Send logs to Grafana Cloud using Alloy" url="https://grafana.com/docs/learning-paths/send-logs-alloy-loki/" >}}

Interactive Tutorials

To learn more about how to configure Alloy to send logs to Loki within different scenarios, follow these interactive tutorials: