influxdb-apply VS loki

Yes, `apply` is hard. It's just as hard as deploying, maintaining, and turning down a service. When adding an `apply` command to a devops tool, the tool authors must think through the entire lifecycle of their service in the user's workflow and make it work well.

The tool creators are the ones with the knowledge to figure these things out. If they don't provide `apply`, then users must research and experiment and learn by making mistakes. This is a colossal waste of effort. Users end up with brittle poorly-documented scripts to do all the things that `apply` would do. These scripts cause ongoing waste of engineering effort, customer frustration from downtime, and lost business growth and revenue.

I spent several weeks making `apply` commands for InfluxDB [0] and Grafana. This proved extremely difficult for Grafana because of deficiencies in its API. Both InfluxDB and Grafana need some work to make them fit into a modern infrastructure-as-code ops environment. Grafana's cofounder and product lead were not interested in my feedback [1] [2].

[0] https://github.com/cozydate/influxdb-apply

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23136582

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23233468

I also needed to make a small patch to Promtail to make this work: https://github.com/grafana/loki/pull/10256

We don't pull logs, we forward logs to a centralized logging service.

Over the past few months, I've been spending a lot of time creating dashboards on Grafana using Loki for MyUnisoft (the company I work for).

For log systems you generally don't migrate data. Logs lose value over time. What you want to do is to go ahead and start ingesting data into the new system (OpenObserve in this case) and slowly, the data in the old system will become stale and then you can retire it. However if you need to export logs anyhow, there is no straightforward way in loki to do this. You could run a script to query loki and export it to a file. If found this thread with a sample script - https://github.com/grafana/loki/issues/409

That snap is woefully out of date. The upstream repo was recently updated to 2.8.2, but the snap stable channel has 2.4.1 from 18 months ago. https://github.com/grafana/loki/releases/tag/v2.8.2

Loki

I installed promtail a few weeks back and I ran into this bug, that has been outstanding for months: https://github.com/grafana/loki/issues/8663 (e.g. a fix had been written but had not been released):

Due to a buffering issue, Loki would exit in case of configuration error without printing any error message or anything at all

There is definitely something weird about how the project is run.