How to scale Alloy as a central telemetry gateway: capacity planning, load testing, and production lessons

Summary

Grafana Labs published guidance on scaling Alloy from a single-instance sidecar to a centralized telemetry gateway handling enterprise-scale telemetry volumes.

Key facts

• Grafana Labs published the guidance on 2026-08-21.
• The material covers capacity planning, load testing, and production lessons.
• A centralized gateway absorbs tens of millions of active series.
• It handles terabytes of logs per day and tens of thousands of trace spans per second.

Why it matters

Teams running Alloy only as a sidecar get no guidance for gateway-scale loads, so those planning centralized telemetry collection must account for capacity planning and load testing before production.