Route to Grafana Cloud Loki

Grafana Cloud Loki is one of the most common destinations for log telemetry. The loki exporter ships in both Grafana Alloy and otelcol-contrib — no additional install, no custom build.

What you’ll do

1. Get your Grafana Cloud Loki endpoint URL, tenant ID, and an API key with the logs:write scope.
2. Add a Grafana Cloud Loki destination in the LinkMesh UI with those credentials.
3. Wire it into a route on the collector that produces your logs.
4. Verify delivery in Grafana Explore.

1. Get the credentials

In Grafana Cloud → My Account → Loki, you’ll see:

• A push URL like https://logs-prod-eu-west-0.grafana.net/loki/api/v1/push
• Your tenant ID (the numeric user under “Username / Instance ID”)
• An API key — create one with the MetricsPublisher role if you don’t already have one

2. Create the destination

Open Route → Destinations in the sidebar and click + New Destination.

The destination picker. Pick 'Grafana Cloud Loki' for the canned form — it knows about basic-auth, tenant IDs, and Loki labels out of the box.

Pick Grafana Cloud Loki. The form prompts for:

• Endpoint URL — paste verbatim from Grafana Cloud
• Tenant ID — the numeric user / instance ID
• API key — pasted into the credential field (LinkMesh stores it encrypted in the destination config; collectors receive it via their runtime’s config channel — Alloy over remotecfg, otelcol-contrib over OpAMP — never as plaintext in a pushed config)

The Grafana Cloud Loki destination form. The 'Default labels' toggle controls which OTel resource attributes get promoted to Loki labels — start with job:true and leave exporter:false to avoid label cardinality blow-up.

Caution

Replace eu-west-0 in the endpoint with the region matching your Grafana Cloud stack. The endpoint URL is shown in the Loki details page in Grafana Cloud — copy it verbatim.

3. Wire it into a route

Open the collector that handles your log source. Switch to the Routing tab and either create a new route or edit an existing one. Set:

• Source: the log source you want to ship
• Pipeline: whatever pipeline you want (or none — raw passthrough)
• Destinations: add the new Grafana Cloud Loki destination

Save. The collector picks up the new routing within a few seconds.

4. Verify

Open Grafana Cloud → Explore → select the Loki datasource. Query:

{job="linkmesh"} |= ""

You should see log records flowing within ~30 seconds of the route save. If nothing arrives:

• journalctl -u alloy -e (or -u otelcol-contrib -e) will print 4xx auth errors or 5xx endpoint errors
• The LinkMesh UI’s per-component throughput on the collector’s Outputs tab shows the loki/grafana_cloud exporter with rec/s and any failures — that’s faster than tailing the collector log

How the generated config looks

For operators auditing what the UI pushed, the underlying OTel YAML on the collector is:

exporters:
  loki/grafana_cloud:
    endpoint: https://logs-prod-eu-west-0.grafana.net/loki/api/v1/push
    auth:
      authenticator: basicauth/grafana_cloud
    default_labels_enabled:
      exporter: false
      job: true

extensions:
  basicauth/grafana_cloud:
    client_auth:
      username: "<your-tenant-id>"
      password: ${env:GRAFANA_LOKI_API_KEY}

service:
  extensions: [basicauth/grafana_cloud]
  pipelines:
    logs:
      receivers:  [otlp, filelog]
      processors: [batch]
      exporters:  [loki/grafana_cloud]

The API key lands in the collector runtime’s own environment — the supervisor’s environment for otelcol-contrib under OpAMP, or Alloy’s service environment for remotecfg — and the collector reads it through ${env:GRAFANA_LOKI_API_KEY} at startup.

Related

• Destination — the concept this recipe creates
• Route — what binds the destination to actual traffic
• Mask PII before this exporter — strongly recommended for any log pipeline that touches user data
• LinkMesh pricing — LinkMesh is priced per Collector, so multi-tenant routing to Loki has no per-GB cost on the LinkMesh side (your Grafana Cloud usage is separate)