winston-loki

A Grafana Loki transport for the nodejs logging library Winston.

Usage

This Winston transport is used similarly to other Winston transports. Require winston and define a new LokiTransport() inside its options when creating it.

Examples

Several usage examples with a test configuration for Grafana+Loki+Promtail reside under examples/. If you want the simplest possible configuration, that's probably the place to check out. By defining json: true and giving winston-loki the correct host address for Loki is enough for most.

Options

LokiTransport() takes a Javascript object as an input. These are the options that are available, required in bold:

Parameter	Description	Example	Default
host	URL for Grafana Loki	http://127.0.0.1:3100	null
interval	The interval at which batched logs are sent in seconds	30	5
json	Use JSON instead of Protobuf for transport	true	false
batching	If batching is not used, the logs are sent as they come	true	true
clearOnError	Discard any logs that result in an error during transport	true	false
replaceTimestamp	Replace any log timestamps with Date.now(). Warning: Disabling replaceTimestamp may result in logs failing to upload due to recent changes in the upstream Loki project. It is recommended to leave this option enabled unless you have a specific reason to disable it.	true	true
labels	custom labels, key-value pairs	{ module: 'http' }	undefined
format	winston format (https://github.com/winstonjs/winston#formats)	simple()	undefined
gracefulShutdown	Enable/disable graceful shutdown (wait for any unsent batches)	false	true
timeout	timeout for requests to grafana loki in ms	30000	undefined
basicAuth	basic authentication credentials to access Loki over HTTP	username:password	undefined
onConnectionError	Loki error connection handler	(err) => console.error(err)	undefined
useWinstonMetaAsLabels	Use Winston's "meta" (such as defaultMeta values) as Loki labels	true	false
ignoredMeta	When useWinstonMetaAsLabels is enabled, a list of meta values to ignore	["error_description"]	undefined

Example (Running Loki Locally)

With default formatting:

const { createLogger, transports } = require("winston");
const LokiTransport = require("winston-loki");
const options = {
  ...,
  transports: [
    new LokiTransport({
      host: "http://127.0.0.1:3100"
    })
  ]
  ...
};
const logger = createLogger(options);

You can set custom labels in every log as well like this:

logger.debug({ message: 'test', labels: { 'key': 'value' } })

TODO: Add custom formatting example

Example (Grafana Cloud Loki)

Important: this snippet requires the following values, here are the instructions for how you can find them.

• LOKI_HOST: find this in your Grafana Cloud instance by checking Connections > Data Sources, find the right Loki connection, and copy its URL, which may look like https://logs-prod-006.grafana.net
• USER_ID: the user number in the same data source definition, it will be a multi-digit number like 372040
• GRAFANA_CLOUD_TOKEN: In Grafana Cloud, search for Cloud Access Policies. Create a new Cloud Access Policy, ensuring its scopes include logs:write. Generate a token for this cloud access policy, and use this value here.

const { createLogger, transports } = require("winston");
const LokiTransport = require("winston-loki");
const options = {
  ...,
  transports: [
    new LokiTransport({
        host: 'LOKI_HOST',
        labels: { app: 'my-app' },
        json: true,
        basicAuth: 'USER_ID:GRAFANA_CLOUD_TOKEN',
        format: winston.format.json(),
        replaceTimestamp: true,
        onConnectionError: (err) => console.error(err),
    })
  ]
  ...
};
const logger = createLogger(options);
logger.debug({ message: 'test', labels: { 'key': 'value' } })

Developing

Requirements

Running a local Loki for testing is probably required, and the easiest way to do that is to follow this guide: https://github.com/grafana/loki/tree/master/production#run-locally-using-docker. After that, Grafana Loki instance is available at http://localhost:3100, with a Grafana instance running at http://localhost:3000. Username admin, password admin. Add the Loki source with the URL http://loki:3100, and the explorer should work.

Refer to https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/api/ for documentation about the available endpoints, data formats etc.

Example

npm install
npm link
cd ~/your_project
npm link winston-loki
npm install

And you should have a working, requirable winston-loki package under your project's node_modules. After the link has been established, any changes to winston-loki should show on rerun of the software that uses it.

Run tests

npm test

Write new ones under /test