Promtail is EOL, replace with Alloy? #20

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dannygroenewegen · 2026-04-01T17:30:07Z

dannygroenewegen commented

2026-04-01 17:30:07 +00:00

Promtail has reached EOL on March 2, 2026. Grafana recommends Alloy as its replacement. Alloy can convert the promtail configuration file.

I briefly went through the docs, and it also looks like Alloy could replace cadvisor and node_exporter. Alloy can push metrics and logs to Prometheus and Loki, which would simplify the setup because we would only need to configure the same Prometheus server on every server we want to monitor, instead of the current situation, where you have to add every server to the scrape config in Prometheus.

It also looks like Alloy could discover Docker containers through labels. That would create the possibility for every app capable of exposing metrics to put its metric endpoint in a label, and Alloy will automatically collect those metrics. No need to publicly expose endpoints anymore if Alloy can scrape everything locally.

Promtail has reached EOL on March 2, 2026. Grafana recommends Alloy as its replacement. Alloy can convert the promtail configuration file. I briefly went through the docs, and it also looks like Alloy could replace cadvisor and node_exporter. Alloy can push metrics and logs to Prometheus and Loki, which would simplify the setup because we would only need to configure the same Prometheus server on every server we want to monitor, instead of the current situation, where you have to add every server to the scrape config in Prometheus. It also looks like Alloy could discover Docker containers through labels. That would create the possibility for every app capable of exposing metrics to put its metric endpoint in a label, and Alloy will automatically collect those metrics. No need to publicly expose endpoints anymore if Alloy can scrape everything locally.

p4u1 commented

2026-04-01 19:03:24 +00:00

Alloy looks good to me and I'm all for removing moving parts! And if we could collect metrics without exposing them to the world that would be so awesome!!

fauno commented

2026-05-28 23:13:05 +00:00

It also looks like Alloy could discover Docker containers through labels

Are you refering to something like this?

https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2026-prometheus-metrics-discovery-docker-labels

> It also looks like Alloy could discover Docker containers through labels Are you refering to something like this? https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2026-prometheus-metrics-discovery-docker-labels

fauno referenced a pull request that will close this issue

2026-05-28 23:34:11 +00:00

WIP: BREAKING CHANGES: replace promtail and cadvisor for alloy #21

dannygroenewegen commented

2026-05-29 06:49:46 +00:00

It also looks like Alloy could discover Docker containers through labels

Are you refering to something like this?

https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2026-prometheus-metrics-discovery-docker-labels

Yes! I think I read another source, but it looks similar.

> > It also looks like Alloy could discover Docker containers through labels > > Are you refering to something like this? > > https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2026-prometheus-metrics-discovery-docker-labels Yes! I think I read another source, but it looks similar.

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Reference: coop-cloud/monitoring-ng#20