Hi everyone
I am playing around with the new Grafana Alloy and OpenTelemetry. I’m new to the topic so I apologize in advance, if my question is a bit trivial.
I managed to connect my alloy to Grafana Cloud and I’m receiving data using the “https://otlp-gateway-prod-eu-west-2.grafana.net/otlp” URL and the otlp.exporter. Yet the data is obviously not saved in a dedicated OpenTelemetry Data Source but is “sent” to a Prometheus Data Source. So now to my question:
What is the difference between a Data Source and a Connector in that case? Since I am sending OpenTelemetry Data to a dedicated API I would expect to see a List of my existing Connectors somewhere? Or how is this handled exactly?
I would very much appreciate if someone could send me a reference in the documentation or explain this to me.
Thanks a lot! 
By data source i am assuming the data source you set up in Grafana to pull data from? If that’s the case, your data sources would be Grafana Cloud’s platform solutions (Loki for logs, Mimir for metrics, tempo for traces, etc). Loki and Mimir support ingestion of data from open telemetry protocols, but the data are still going to Loki and Mimir.
Thanks for your answer
Yes, I mean the Data Source in Grafana Cloud to pull Metrics from.
I understand that the data will always end up in one of those TSDBs, depending on whether we are talking about Logs, Metrics or Traces. What I am struggling to understand is how the data gets to those DBs.
Does the OTLP Gateway in Grafana Cloud automatically identify, whether it received Logs or Metrics via OpenTelemetry and ingests it in a respective DB? Because theoretically I could set up multiple Mimir and Loki Instances but I never had to declare which specific TSDB the data is sent to, when using OpenTelemetry.
Not exactly, that’s in the Opentelemetry protocol definition - there is a term “signal”, which can be metric, trace, log, …
OTLP Gateway in Grafana Cloud identifies your instance based on used authentication.
That’s exactly what I was looking for, Thank you very much!
So if I were to deploy for example 2 separate Loki Instances, I would have to create 2 different API Tokens to be able to steer which DB my data is ingested to when using an OTLP Gateway?
