LGTM Stack
Properties
created
14.04.2026, 17:00
modified
26.07.2026, 13:52
published
Empty
topics
Observability, LGTM Stack, Kubernetes
authors
Empty
ai-assisted
Yes
- Grafana’s open-source observability stack covering all three pillars ( Grafana LGTM Stack Overview)
- L — Loki (logs)
- G — Grafana (visualization)
- T — Tempo (traces)
- M — Mimir or Prometheus (metrics)
# How the Components Fit Together
| |
- Alloy/Collector is the single ingestion point — services don’t talk to backends directly
- Grafana queries all backends as data sources and correlates across them
# Grafana Alloy
- Modern replacement for Promtail, Grafana Agent, and partially OTel Collector ( Grafana Alloy Docs)
- Single binary that collects logs, metrics, traces, and profiles
- Configuration in River/Alloy language (HCL-inspired)
- Can forward to any LGTM backend or any OTLP-compatible destination
- Replaces the need to run separate Promtail + OTel Collector agents in K8s
# Kubernetes Deployment
# Helm Charts
grafana/lgtm-distributed— full distributed LGTM stack (production-grade, microservices mode)grafana/grafana— standalone Grafanaprometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack— Prometheus + Grafana + Alertmanager + exporters ( kube-prometheus-stack)grafana/alloy— Grafana Alloy as DaemonSet collector
# Typical Production Setup
- Alloy as DaemonSet — collects node logs, scrapes pod metrics, receives OTLP traces
- Loki as StatefulSet or Mimir/Tempo in distributed mode
- Grafana as Deployment with persistent dashboard storage
- Object storage (S3/MinIO) as the backing store for Loki, Tempo, Mimir
# Grafana Cloud Alternative
- Grafana Labs hosts the full LGTM stack as a managed service
- Free tier available; services write to Grafana Cloud via OTLP or remote_write
# Data Flow Per Signal
| Signal | Collector | Storage | Query |
|---|---|---|---|
| Logs | Alloy / Promtail | Loki | LogQL |
| Metrics | Alloy / Prometheus scrape | Mimir / Prometheus | PromQL |
| Traces | Alloy / OTel Collector | Tempo | TraceQL |
# Topics
- Prometheus
- Pull-based metrics collection, PromQL, Alertmanager, Grafana Mimir for scale
- Grafana Loki
- Label-indexed log aggregation, LogQL, Promtail/Alloy shipping
- Grafana Tempo
- Object-storage trace backend, TraceQL, trace-to-logs/metrics correlation
- Grafana
- Visualization layer, dashboards, Explore, cross-pillar correlations, alerting