---
title: "What is a component | Grafana Labs"
description: "The building block that does one job in an Alloy pipeline"
---

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

Section 3 · Components and pipelines

The building block that does one job in an Alloy pipeline

Estimated time: 1 min

## What is a component

You describe Alloy’s collect, transform, and send work with components.

In Alloy, a component is a building block that does one job. Components do the three jobs, collect, transform, and send, plus one more: finding the endpoints to collect from, called targets.

You connect components so that data flows through a pipeline that matches your needs. A pipeline is a chain of connected components that data passes through from source to destination.

## Type and label

Each component has a type and a label. Take `loki.write "local"` as an example. `loki.write` is the type, and it tells you what kind of work the component does. `"local"` is the label, and it identifies this specific instance. Labels matter because you can run more than one `loki.write` component in a configuration, and you need a way to tell them apart.

The type and label combine to form the component’s identifier, `loki.write.local`. Use this identifier to reference the component’s exports elsewhere in your configuration.

A component label isn’t the same as a label attached to telemetry data, such as a Prometheus metric label. A component label identifies a piece of your configuration. A telemetry label is metadata that travels with the data itself as it moves through the pipeline.