One day, during one of my company's cloud project meetings, a developer colleague said, "I need to find a way to quickly access logs for debugging and troubleshooting." I already had some experience with the Grafana-Prometheus, so I said I would help find a solution.

It turns out, the solution we settled on was Loki [1], from Grafana Labs. The Grafana Labs website describes Loki as "…a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus." Loki is designed to aggregate logs efficiently, extracting metrics and alerts – all without requiring a massive indexing configuration. Once you have extracted the information you need, you can then use Grafana to visualize the data.

This workshop offers a quick look at how to access log data using Loki. In this scenario, I will push logs generated by an Apache web server hosting a sample Nextcloud deployment, then evaluate the data using Loki's own query language, LogQL.

In addition to a Loki server, I'll install the companion application Promtail [2], which Grafana Labs maintains as an agent to push data to Loki.

Log Factory

The first step is to start logging. If you already have a log-filled folder, just skip this step. In this case, I'll run a Nextcloud Docker container. I'll "mount" (bind) the Apache web server log folder inside the container to a local folder on the workstation. This step will allow Promtail, which will run locally, to access the files.

Of course you need to have the Docker engine installed. If you don't, see the box entitled "Get Docker Ready."

# curl -sSL https://get.docker.com | sudo bash

docker run --name nextcloud -d -p 8080:80 -v /somelogsdir:/var/log/apache2 nextcloud

Once the container is running, you can sail a browser to:

http://localhost:8080

and perform some actions on the Nextcloud instance. It doesn't really matter what you do as long as it generates entries in the access.log and error.log Apache default log files.

Deploying

Download the binary release of the most recent version of both Loki and Promtail. Regarding Loki, fetch both the binary distribution and a sample config file:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/grafana/loki/v2.2.1/cmd/loki/loki-local-config.yaml -O loki_config.yaml
wget https://github.com/grafana/loki/releases/download/v2.2.1/loki-linux-amd64.zip
unzip loki-linux-amd64.zip

The Loki sample config is already good enough for this workshop, so I'll execute it and keep it running:

./loki-linux-amd64 -config.file=loki_config.yaml

If you see a bunch of creating table messages, that is a good sign – it means Loki is creating the structure to host the log entries.

The next step is to set up and run Promtail:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/
grafana/loki/master/cmd/promtail/promtail-local-config.yaml-O promtail_config.yaml
wget https://github.com/grafana/loki/releases/download/v2.2.1/promtail-linux-amd64.zip
unzip promtail-linux-amd64.zip

Before running Promtail, you'll need to tweak the configuration to set up a Loki URL and log source folder (lines 9 and 18 in Listing 1).

01 server:
02  http_listen_port: 9080
03  grpc_listen_port: 0
04
05 positions:
06  filename: /tmp/positions.yaml
07
08 clients:
09   - url: "http://localhost:3100/loki/api/v1/push"
10 scrape_configs:
11 - job_name: apache
12   static_configs:
13   - targets:
14       - localhost
15     labels:
16       job: "apache"
17       instance: "localserver"
18       __path__: /somelogsdir/*.log

Once you have successfully configured Promtail, run it with:

./promtail-linux-amd64 -config.file=promtail_config.yaml

If everything is working as expected, you won't get any output yet from the logs being pushed to Loki.

Evaluation

Loki has no built-in UI, so the only way to query logs at this point is to make use of the excellent Loki RESTful API (see the box entitled "Structure").

The following query asks Loki to provide the most recent log entries, limiting the result to three entries:

curl -G -s  "http://localhost:3100/loki/api/v1/query_range?limit=3" --data-urlencode 'query={job="apache"}' | jq

The results of the query appear in Listing 2.

01 {
02   "status": "success",
03   "data": {
04     "resultType": "streams",
05     "result": [
06       {
07         "stream": {
08           "filename": "/somelogsdir/access.log",
09           "instance": "localserver",
10           "job": "apache"
11         },
12         "values": [
13           [
14             "1620748522681322318",
15             "172.17.0.1 - - [11/May/2021:15:55:22 +0000] \"GET /csrftoken HTTP/1.1\" 200 928 \"-\"\"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:88.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/88.0\""
16           ],
17           [
18             "1620748504911781382",
19             "172.17.0.1 - - [11/May/2021:15:55:04 +0000] \"GET /csrftoken HTTP/1.1\" 200 929 \"-\"\"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:88.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/88.0\""
20           ],
21           [
22             "1620748336477761747",
23             "172.17.0.1 - - [11/May/2021:15:50:54 +0000] \"GET /cron.php HTTP/1.1\" 200 931 \"-\"\"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:88.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/88.0\""
24           ]
25         ]
26       }
27     ],
28    "stats": {}
29 }