// the find
grafana/agent
Vendor-neutral programmable observability pipelines.
Grafana Agent was a programmable observability collector bridging Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and the Grafana stack (Loki, Tempo, Mimir). It introduced a Terraform-inspired config language called River that let you wire together components into explicit pipelines. It is EOL as of November 2025 — the successor is Grafana Alloy.
The River/Flow config model was genuinely better than YAML soup: explicit data flow between named components made pipelines inspectable and the built-in UI let you see the live graph. The component library was wide — 80+ receivers, exporters, and processors covering Kubernetes, cloud providers, and most common databases. Migration tooling to Alloy exists and the concepts carry over almost directly, so time spent here isn't wasted.
It's dead. EOL November 2025 means no security patches, no new features, and the documentation site will eventually go dark. The dual-mode existence (static config + Flow) created genuine confusion and the old static mode is just a liability now. Anyone starting fresh today has no reason to pick this over Alloy, which is built on the same foundation and is actively maintained.