Grafana Alloy on Ubuntu 24.04

This is a repackaged open source software product wherein additional charges apply for cloudimg support services.

## Grafana Alloy - Production-Ready OpenTelemetry Collector on AWS

Skip hours of manual setup and launch a fully secured OpenTelemetry Collector in under five minutes. This AMI delivers Grafana Alloy 1.17.1 - the vendor-neutral, single-binary OpenTelemetry Collector distribution from Grafana Labs - pre-installed, hardened, and managed by systemd. It is purpose-built for SREs, platform engineers, and DevOps teams who need to collect, process, and forward metrics, logs, traces, and profiles from a single declarative configuration.

## Why This AMI Instead of a Manual Install

Deploying Alloy from scratch means installing packages, wiring systemd units, configuring a reverse proxy, generating credentials, and hardening the UI endpoint. This image eliminates all of that:

• Zero manual package setup - Alloy is installed from Grafana's official repository and managed by systemd for automatic restarts and clean journald logging.
• Secure by default - The Alloy web UI is bound to the loopback interface only. Nginx fronts it on port 80 behind HTTP Basic Auth with a password generated uniquely per instance on first boot and stored in a root-only file. No shared or default credential ever ships in the image.
• Live component-graph UI - See exactly how telemetry flows through your pipeline, inspect the health of every component, and troubleshoot in real time - all accessible from your browser after authenticating.
• Unauthenticated health endpoint - A dedicated endpoint is exposed for load-balancer and Auto Scaling health probes without requiring credentials.
• Unattended security updates - The OS is fully patched at build time and configured for automatic security updates going forward.

## Working Demo Pipeline Out of the Box

The image ships a self-contained demo pipeline that scrapes Alloy's own internal metrics, tags and batches them, bridges them from the Prometheus pipeline into the OpenTelemetry pipeline, and logs a summary locally. Nothing leaves the instance, every component is healthy on first boot, and the component-graph UI is populated immediately. Explore a real working pipeline, then replace it with your own production configuration.

## Example Production Use Case

A team running dozens of EC2 instances with mixed exporters (Node Exporter, application metrics, structured logs) can deploy this AMI on each host to consolidate collection into a single Alloy process. From one declarative config, Alloy scrapes local Prometheus endpoints, receives OTLP traces from application SDKs, and forwards everything to Grafana Cloud, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope, or any OpenTelemetry-compatible backend - eliminating the need for multiple sidecar agents and reducing operational overhead.

## Ship Telemetry Anywhere

Alloy supports forwarding to:

• Prometheus and Grafana Mimir (metrics)
• Grafana Loki (logs)
• Grafana Tempo (traces)
• Grafana Pyroscope (profiles)
• Any OTLP-compatible backend

## Quick Start

1. Launch the AMI with a security group allowing inbound TCP port 80.

2. SSH into the instance and retrieve your unique password from the root-only file.

3. Open http:// in your browser and authenticate.

4. Explore the live component graph and demo pipeline.

5. Edit the Alloy configuration file to define your production pipeline and restart the service.

## 24/7 Support Included

cloudimg provides around-the-clock technical support covering deployment, upgrades, pipeline configuration, and forwarding telemetry to any supported backend. Support aims to respond within one business day.

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Grafana and Grafana Alloy are trademarks of Raintank, Inc. dba Grafana Labs. Grafana Alloy is distributed under the Apache License 2.0. All product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. Use of them does not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by them.