---
title: "What Alloy does | Grafana Labs"
description: "The three jobs Alloy performs, collect, transform, and send"
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

Section 2 · How Alloy works

The three jobs Alloy performs, collect, transform, and send

Estimated time: 1 min

## What Alloy does

In the collection layer, Alloy performs three main jobs: it collects telemetry, transforms it, and sends it to your backends.

### Collect telemetry data

Alloy gathers telemetry from sources in your infrastructure. In addition to scraping, receiving pushed data, or tailing a source, it can also:

- Automatically find the endpoints to collect from in Kubernetes or Docker (service discovery)
- Integrate with specialized systems such as databases and message queues

### Transform and process data

Before data reaches storage, Alloy can reshape it. It can:

- Filter out unwanted data or redact secrets
- Add identifying fields, often called labels, and other context
- Standardize attribute names across services
- Keep only a subset of high-volume data (sampling)
- Convert between formats
- Route different data types to different destinations

### Send to backends

Alloy delivers the processed telemetry to the systems you choose:

- Grafana Cloud
- Self-managed Grafana stack components such as Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope
- Prometheus-compatible databases
- OpenTelemetry-compatible backends

You can send to more than one destination from a single configuration.