OpenTelemetry at Grafana Labs

Observe and monitor the performance of your organization’s applications. Powered by OpenTelemetry, Grafana Labs open source, and Grafana Cloud.

Overview

OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework that provides vendor-neutral instrumentation libraries, APIs, and tools. It helps you collect metrics, logs, traces, and profiles from your applications while protecting you from vendor lock-in and ensuring data portability across different observability platforms.

Grafana Labs supports OpenTelemetry as a core part of our observability strategy. We offer a comprehensive observability stack that helps you collect, ingest, store, analyze, and visualize telemetry data. Using OpenTelemetry with Grafana Labs gives you a flexible and scalable observability solution.

1. Instrument your application
   Add telemetry to your applications using Grafana auto-instrumentation agents and SDKs, Grafana Beyla, or by using upstream OpenTelemetry SDKs.
2. Build data pipelines
   Create robust and scalable data pipelines with Grafana Alloy, an OpenTelemetry Collector distribution, or the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector.
3. Ingest OTLP data
   Send OTLP data from your instrumentation or pipeline to Grafana Cloud or self-managed Grafana Loki, Grafana Mimir, and Grafana Tempo.
4. Gain application insights
   Use Grafana Cloud Application Observability, Grafana dashboards, Grafana Drilldown, and alerts to analyze your telemetry data and gain insights.

OpenTelemetry instrumentation

Instrument your applications by following our documentation or using Grafana Cloud onboarding workflows or integration connection tiles. Refer to the OpenTelemetry instrumentation documentation to get started.

OpenTelemetry Collector

Set up an OpenTelemetry Collector by following our documentation or using Grafana Cloud onboarding workflows or integration connection tiles. Grafana Alloy, our distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector, provides additional features and integrations tailored for the Grafana ecosystem. Refer to the OpenTelemetry Collector documentation to get started.

Ingest OTLP data

Send your OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) data directly to Grafana Cloud or self-managed Grafana Loki, Grafana Mimir, and Grafana Tempo. Configure your instrumentation or Collector to transmit telemetry data to the appropriate endpoints. Grafana Cloud provides dedicated OTLP endpoints that simplify this process with automatic routing of metrics, logs, traces, and profiles to the right backend.

You can ingest OTLP data by following the documentation or using Grafana Cloud onboarding workflows or integration connection tiles. Refer to OTLP data ingestion to get started.

Gain application insights

Transform your OpenTelemetry data into actionable insights using Grafana’s visualization and analysis tools. With your applications instrumented and data pipelines configured, you can now detect performance bottlenecks, troubleshoot issues, and optimize application performance.

• Application Observability: Get immediate visibility into application performance with pre-configured dashboards that automatically detect anomalies and help identify root causes
• Grafana Drilldown: Navigate through your metrics, logs, traces, and profiles without writing complex queries using specialized Drilldown apps for Loki, Mimir, and Tempo
• Alerts: Create and manage sophisticated alert rules based on your OpenTelemetry data to proactively detect and respond to issues before they impact users
• Grafana IRM: Streamline incident response with integrated incident management that connects directly to your telemetry data for faster resolution
• Grafana dashboards: Build custom visualizations and correlate data across different telemetry types to gain deeper insights into your applications
• Grafana Mimir: Store and analyze metrics with this highly scalable Prometheus-compatible backend
• Grafana Loki: Search and explore logs with this horizontally scalable log aggregation system
• Grafana Tempo: Analyze distributed traces to troubleshoot complex transactions across services
• Grafana Pyroscope: Identify code-level performance issues with continuous profiling data

Refer to the Application insights documentation to learn how to gain meaningful insights from your OpenTelemetry data.

By integrating OpenTelemetry with Grafana Labs products, you get comprehensive, scalable, and actionable observability for your applications.

Recommended setup for Grafana Cloud

Grafana Labs recommends that you set up OpenTelemetry components, including instrumentation and an OpenTelemetry Collector distribution, using one of the Grafana Cloud setup guides.

These opinionated guides make it easy to get started. They include all the binaries, configuration, and connection parameters you need to set up OpenTelemetry for Grafana Cloud.