The Grafana Cloud Agent is an observability data collector optimized for sending metrics and log data to Grafana Cloud. Today, with its Prometheus metrics collection, it is designed to handle the main problems faced by users of large deployments of Prometheus:
- Grafana Cloud Agent uses less memory on average than Prometheus – by doing less
(only focusing on
remote_write-related functionality). - Grafana Cloud Agent allows for deploying multiple instances of the Agent in a cluster and only scraping metrics from targets that running at the same host. This allows distributing memory requirements across the cluster rather than pressurizing a single node.