loki VS Grafana

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That snap is woefully out of date.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.

Monitoring application logs is a crucial aspect of the software development and deployment lifecycle. In this post, we'll delve into the process of observing logs generated by Docker container applications operating within HashiCorp Nomad. With the aid of Grafana, Vector, and Loki, we'll explore effective strategies for log analysis and visualization, enhancing visibility and troubleshooting capabilities within your Nomad environment.

To help us visualize these scenarios, we'll build a Grafana Dashboard so we can follow along.

Visualization and Analysis: Choose a tool with intuitive and customizable dashboards, charts, and visualizations. A question to ask is, "Are the visualization features of this tool user-friendly and adaptable to our team's specific needs?" Tools like Grafana and Kibana provide powerful visualization capabilities.

Prometheus: Open-source monitoring system. Often used together with Grafana.

Grafana

Yes I'm aware that Grafana is open source but the method I used to find the API endpoints is far quicker than digging through hundreds of files in a codebase I'm not familiar with.

So, you will add one last container to allow us to visualize this data: Grafana, an open-source analytics and visualization platform that allows us to see traces and metrics simply. You can set Grafana to read data from both Tempo and Prometheus by setting them as datastores with the following grafana.datasource.yaml config file:

In example above, we use 2 additional parameters: code (HTTP response code) and page (page identifier), which provide detailed statistics. For example, you can build such graphs in Grafana:

Robin switched to the Grafana dashboard tab, and sure enough, the 5xx volume on web service was rising. It had not hit the critical alert thresholds yet, but customers had already started noticing.