Destination
A destination is a terminal exporter: Grafana Cloud Loki, ClickHouse,
S3, Splunk, OTLP, Kafka, debug, and the rest of the OTel ecosystem.
It’s the egress side of the pipeline — the thing telemetry actually
arrives at after every processor in the chain has done its work.
Each destination is configured once and then referenced by one or more routes that send telemetry to it. The destination owns its own credentials, endpoint, TLS config, retry behaviour, and an optional output filter that drops records before they leave the collector.
Mental model
Picture a destination as a configured shipping label. Many routes can slap the same label on their output and the telemetry goes to the same backend — credentials, batching, and TLS are configured exactly once. Routes hold a reference to the destination, not a copy of its config; rotating credentials means editing one destination, not every route that uses it.
Scope: collector or group
A destination is activated on a single collector or shared across a Collector Group. A group-level destination materialises on every member at config-generation time, which is how a fleet of collectors all ship to the same Grafana Cloud stack without each operator pasting in the same endpoint and token.
Where it lives
| Surface | Path |
|---|---|
| UI | Route → Destinations in the sidebar, or Collector detail → Destinations tab |
| Storage | YAML at gitops/collectors/<collectorID>/destinations/<destinationID>.yaml (or gitops/groups/<groupID>/destinations/… for group-scoped destinations) |
| Generated config | One exporter block per activation in the collector’s rendered OTel config |
| Credentials | Stored in the same YAML, encrypted via the server’s data-key envelope |
See also
- Route — what binds a destination to actual traffic
- Collector Group — how to share one destination across a fleet
- Route to Grafana Cloud Loki — end-to-end recipe for the most common Grafana Cloud setup