An announcement was made at GrafanaCON. Alloy is introduced in the family of Grafana tools. Alloy is an open source distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector, but is will also replace Promtail. In the Observability Toolkit I use both Promtail and OpenTelemetry Collector, so it makes sense to merge them. In this blog post I will replace Promtail with Alloy. In another post I will see how replacing of OpenTelemetry Collector with Alloy will look like.

During GrafanaCON I presented by talk and I also introduced the topic ’explore traces’ during the Unconference track. Talk Photos Unconference topics, explore traces as first Introduction of unconference topic explore traces ‹ ›

Deep understanding of the actual behavior of a system is key for me. I like to know all the details because it helps me to see the whole picture. I am visually oriented, so tools like Grafana really help me in these situations. Observability is a topic that has come up in the last few years, but I have actually been doing this for years. But the good thing is that it is more standardized now.

As shown in my previous post you can add Grafana Faro to get more information about users who visit a website, in my case my own blog. This is how that setup looks like: But what kind of data is available now? Data sent by the browser The libraries from the Web SDK collect technical details about the browser interaction. The goal is not to track users, but to collect all sorts of technical data to see if there are problems with the web pages and what the perceived performance is for the users.

If you use Hugo to create a blog or website, as I do, and you use GitHub Pages to host the blog, it’s hard to get observability signals in your usual observability stack. I have been using Grafana, Loki, Tempo and Prometheus for a long time, so using this stack makes sense to me. You can use Google Analytics with Hugo, but I don’t like third party cookies. If you search for Google Analytics' and GDPR’ you will find quite a few articles about the concerns that exist on this topic.