// the find
grafana-cold-storage/agent
Vendor-neutral programmable observability pipelines.
Grafana Agent is an OpenTelemetry Collector distribution with a Terraform-inspired config language (River) for wiring together observability pipelines across metrics, logs, traces, and profiles. It reached EOL in November 2025 and Grafana now directs users to Grafana Alloy, which is built on the same foundation. If you're starting fresh, this is the wrong repo to adopt.
The River config language is genuinely good — wiring components together with explicit data flow references is far cleaner than YAML inheritance chains. The built-in UI for visualizing and debugging the component graph is something the vanilla OTel collector still lacks. Component coverage is wide: 50+ Prometheus exporters, full Loki/Tempo/Mimir integration, Pyroscope profiling, and Kubernetes operator support all in one binary. The clustering design (documented in RFC 0006) allows stateless horizontal scaling with consistent hashing for scrape target distribution.
It's dead — EOL November 2025, no new features, security patches only until the community moves. Adopting it now means planning a migration to Alloy before you've even gotten value from it. The River language, while clean, is yet another DSL you have to learn that isn't transferable anywhere else. The operator mode and Flow mode have diverged in capability, and the operator is explicitly deprecated with much weaker documentation. Binary size is large (pulls in Prometheus, OTel Collector, and Grafana's entire ecosystem) — not a fit for edge or constrained environments.