Grafana Alloy

This recipe ships data emitted by msb-metrics. See the msb-metrics page for the flag reference, metric names, and deployment constraints.

Grafana Alloy is Grafana’s OpenTelemetry Collector distribution with a programmable pipeline DSL. Run it locally as a forwarder so msb-metrics doesn’t have to deal with retries, batching, credential rotation, or backend hiccups. This is the recommended setup for production deployments. Alloy sits between msb-metrics and the upstream backend. msb-metrics ships locally over plain OTLP with no auth; Alloy owns the credentials, the upstream connection, and the buffering through hiccups.

Install Alloy

Follow the Alloy install guide for your platform.

Configure an OTLP receiver and Grafana Cloud exporter

Save as /etc/alloy/config.alloy:

otelcol.receiver.otlp "ingest" {
  grpc { endpoint = "127.0.0.1:4317" }
  http { endpoint = "127.0.0.1:4318" }

  output {
    metrics = [otelcol.processor.batch.metrics.input]
  }
}

otelcol.processor.batch "metrics" {
  output {
    metrics = [otelcol.exporter.otlphttp.grafana_cloud.input]
  }
}

otelcol.exporter.otlphttp "grafana_cloud" {
  client {
    endpoint = "https://otlp-gateway-prod-us-east-2.grafana.net/otlp"
    auth     = otelcol.auth.basic.grafana_cloud.handler
  }
}

otelcol.auth.basic "grafana_cloud" {
  username = sys.env("GC_INSTANCE_ID")
  password = sys.env("GC_API_TOKEN")
}

Sub the OTLP gateway region for yours.

Start Alloy

GC_INSTANCE_ID=...  GC_API_TOKEN=...  alloy run /etc/alloy/config.alloy

Point msb-metrics at Alloy

msb-metrics otel --endpoint=http://localhost:4317

Alloy owns the upstream connection from here.

Why this is better for production

Buffering survives backend hiccups. Alloy holds data when Grafana Cloud is slow or unreachable; msb-metrics’s per-exporter buffer alone has a ~20MB cap at the default --max-buffered=60 with 1000 sandboxes.
Credential rotation doesn’t touch msb-metrics. Rotate the Grafana Cloud token in Alloy’s config (or via env vars + a config reload) without restarting the collector.
Multiple destinations. Alloy can fan out to additional backends (Prometheus remote-write, Mimir, etc.) without changing the msb-metrics configuration.

Docker

Guest

Metrics backends

Why this is better for production

Reference

​Why this is better for production

​Reference

Why this is better for production

Reference