Install Grafana Alloy

The Grafana Alloy installation process varies by operating system, and you can access the installation commands directly from Grafana Cloud. These commands are pre-configured with your stack-specific connection details, making the setup process straightforward.

Alloy should be installed on a machine with network access to your Kafka brokers’ JMX ports (typically port 9999 or as configured). This can be on one of the Kafka broker machines themselves, or on a dedicated monitoring host with network connectivity to all brokers in your cluster.

1. Navigate to Connections > Add new connection.

2. In the search box, type Kafka and press Enter. You should see the Kafka integration tile.

3. Select the Kafka integration tile.

4. Under Select platform, choose your operating system and architecture.

5. Click Run Grafana Alloy. This opens a dialog to generate your Alloy installation command, which may include creating an API token.

6. Complete the dialog steps, then copy the generated installation command.

7. On the machine where you want to collect Kafka metrics, open a terminal with administrator or root privileges, paste and run the installation command, then wait for the installation to complete.

The installation completes successfully and displays a confirmation message. The Alloy service starts automatically and runs in the background.

In the next milestone, you configure Grafana Alloy to collect metrics from your Kafka brokers.

More to explore (optional)

At this point in your journey, you can explore the following paths:

• What is Grafana Alloy?
• Grafana Alloy configuration syntax and examples

Troubleshooting

Explore the following troubleshooting topics if you need help:

• Common errors when executing Alloy installation script
• Alloy is installed, but data doesn’t appear in Grafana Cloud