Stream logs to Grafana Cloud

A Grafana Cloud log stream sends each request of a gateway environment to Grafana Cloud as one trace over OTLP/HTTP, about 30 seconds after the request ends. The traces are stored in Tempo.

Before you begin

Open the OpenTelemetry page of your stack in Grafana Cloud: My Account, then your stack, then OpenTelemetry. It has the two values the stream needs. See Send data using OpenTelemetry Protocol in the Grafana docs.

Add the stream

In the portal, go to Agent Gateway and select your gateway.
Select the Logs tab, then Log settings.
Under Log streams, select Add a stream.
Under Destination, select Grafana Cloud.
Fill in the fields in the table.
Select Send test event. Faustine sends a trace of one request marked test: true and shows Delivered when Grafana Cloud accepts it.
Select Continue.
Under What to send, choose All requests or Errors and denials, and turn on Discovery calls or Payloads if you want them. Select Continue.
Under Review and create, enter a Name and select Create stream.

Field	Value
OTLP endpoint	The "Endpoint for sending OTLP signals" of the stack, such as `https://otlp-gateway-prod-<region>.grafana.net/otlp`.
Authorization	The `Basic …` value from the same page. It is the instance ID and the token, already encoded.
Service name	The `service.name` of the traces. Optional. Defaults to `faustine-gateway`.

The stream's page opens. The first trace reaches Grafana Cloud about 30 seconds after the next request ends.

What Grafana Cloud receives

Each request is one trace, sent over OTLP/HTTP in JSON. For the spans and their attributes, see What the collector receives.

Next steps

Log streams: delivery, retries and the fields of a request.
Redact sensitive fields: decide what a stream can carry.
Set recording and retention: record the payloads a stream sends.