LoongCollector is a high-performance, lightweight observability data collector designed for modern cloud-native environments. Born from Alibaba's 15-year journey handling exponential traffic growth and powering tens of millions of deployments, LoongCollector delivers with compared to open-source alternatives.
LoongCollector is a key component of LoongSuite(Alibaba's unified observability data collection suite). LoongSuite includes the following key components:
LoongCollector: universal node agent, which prodivdes log collection, prometheus metric collection, and network and security collection capabilities based on eBPF.
The LoongSuite open-source community hosts monthly online sharing meetings. The meeting access link for each meeting will be posted to GitHub Discussions and shared in the DingTalk and WeChat groups within one week prior to the event. Recordings of past meetings are available on Bilibili.
🚀 Core Advantages
⚡ High Performance
10x higher throughput with 80% less resource usage compared to competitors
Linear scaling with predictable performance growth
🛡️ Production-Ready
Battle-tested in Alibaba's production environment for 15+ years
Powers tens of millions of deployments, collecting hundreds of petabytes daily
🔧 All-in-One Collection
Unified agent for logs, metrics, traces, events, and profiles
Native Kubernetes support
eBPF-powered network monitoring and security event collection
🎯 Pluggable Architecture
100+ built-in plugins with multi-language development (C++, Go)
Powerful SPL engine for flexible data processing
⚙️ Advanced Management
Remote configuration management via SLS console, SDK, K8s Operator
Self-monitoring, flow control, resource control, alarms, and statistics collection.
📈 Breaking Point Analysis: While competitors hit CPU saturation at ~40 MB/s, LoongCollector maintains linear scaling up to 546 MB/s on a single processing thread.
Independent resource allocation per pipeline with automatic back-pressure control
Ensures one pipeline failure doesn't affect others
5. Fair Resource Allocation
Priority-aware round-robin scheduling ensures fairness while respecting business priorities
Higher priority pipelines always processed first, fair distribution within same priority level
Automatic resource yielding when constraints occur
6. Self-Healing Network Resilience
Adaptive concurrency limiting per destination using AIMD (Additive Increase, Multiplicative Decrease)
Fast failure detection and gradual recovery to prevent network jitter
Zero data loss guarantee with intelligent back-pressure control
🏭 Production Validation: Battle-Tested at Scale
LoongCollector has been battle-tested in some of the world's most demanding production environments:
Alibaba Group: Powers the entire Alibaba ecosystem including Double 11 shopping festival
Alibaba Cloud: Serves tens of thousands of enterprise customers
Ant Group: Handles financial transaction observability at massive scale
Daily Data Volume: Hundreds of petabytes of observability data
Deployment Scale: Tens of millions of active deployments
🚀 Quick Start
Prerequisites
Docker (for building from source)
Go 1.23+ (for building from source)
Build and Run
# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/alibaba/loongcollector.git
cd loongcollector
git submodule update --init
# Build LoongCollector
make all
cd output
# Start LoongCollector
nohup ./loongcollector > stdout.log 2> stderr.log &
LoongCollector is now running.
Docker Quick Start
# Build the Docker image alibaba/loongcollector:0.0.1
make dist
make docker
# Run with default configuration
docker run -d --name loongcollector \
-v /:/logtail_host:ro \
-v /var/run:/var/run \
alibaba/loongcollector:0.0.1
