Two roads to vendor-neutral telemetry
Both the OpenTelemetry Collector and Grafana Alloy collect, process, and route metrics, logs, and traces without locking you to a backend. Alloy is Grafana's distribution with a powerful configuration language and tight Grafana-stack integration; the upstream Collector is the broadest, most portable baseline.
How to choose
If you're deep in the Grafana stack (Mimir, Loki, Tempo) and want one agent with rich pipeline logic, Alloy is compelling. If you prioritize maximum portability and the widest receiver/exporter ecosystem, the upstream Collector is the safe default. Many estates run both.
The cost-at-scale question
The decision that bites later is cost trajectory at 5–10× telemetry volume. Whichever you pick, design sampling, filtering, and cost controls up front. AspectIQ's consultants build either pipeline so you own your data and can change backends without re-instrumenting.