06 Apr 21:09

slim-bean

2445ccd

v1.4.1

This is release v1.4.1 of Loki.

Important Notes

Please read the Important Notes section for v1.4.0

Mostly be sure to check out the upgrading page, everything for 1.4.0 applies to 1.4.1

Notable changes:

We realized after the release last week that piping data into promtail was not working on Linux or Windows, this should fix this issue for both platforms:

1893 cyriltovena: Removes file size check for pipe, not provided by linux.

Also thanks to @dottedmag for providing this fix for Fluent Bit!

1890 dottedmag: fluentbit: JSON encoding: avoid base64 encoding of []byte inside other slices

Installation:

The components of Loki are currently distributed in plain binary form and as Docker container images. Choose what fits your use-case best.

Docker container:

$ docker pull "grafana/loki:1.4.1"
$ docker pull "grafana/promtail:1.4.1"

Binary

We provide pre-compiled binary executables for the most common operating systems and architectures.
Choose from the assets below for the application and architecture matching your system.
Example for Loki on the linux operating system and amd64 architecture:

$ curl -O -L "https://github.com/grafana/loki/releases/download/v1.4.1/loki-linux-amd64.zip"
# extract the binary
$ unzip "loki-linux-amd64.zip"
# make sure it is executable
$ chmod a+x "loki-linux-amd64"

Assets 27

01 Apr 17:44

slim-bean

v1.4.0

375daae

v1.4.0

This is release v1.4.0 of Loki.

Over 130 PR's merged for this release, from 40 different contributors!! We continue to be humbled and thankful for the growing community of contributors and users of Loki. Thank you all so much.

Important Notes

Really, this is important

Before we get into new features, version 1.4.0 brings with it the first (that we are aware of) upgrade dependency.

We have created a dedicated page for upgrading Loki in the operations section of the docs

The docker image tag naming was changed, the starting in 1.4.0 docker images no longer have the v prefix: grafana/loki:1.4.0

Also you should be aware we are now pruning old master-xxxxx docker images from docker hub, currently anything older than 90 days is removed. We will never remove released versions of Loki

Notable Features

Please checkout the CHANGELOG for the full list of changes, however here are some of the most notable:

1661 cyriltovena: Frontend & Querier query statistics instrumentation.

The API now returns a plethora of stats into the work Loki performed to execute your query, eventually this will be displayed in some form in Grafana to help users better understand how "expensive" their queries are. Our goal here initially was to better instrument the recent work done in v1.3.0 on query parallelization and to better understand the performance of each part of Loki. In the future we are looking at additional ideas to provide feedback to users to tailor their queries for better performance.

1652 cyriltovena: --dry-run Promtail.
1649 cyriltovena: Pipe data to Promtail

This is a long overdue addition to Promtail which can help setup and debug pipelines, with these new features you can do this to feed a single log line into Promtail:

echo -n 'level=debug msg="test log (200)"' | cmd/promtail/promtail -config.file=cmd/promtail/promtail-local-config.yaml --dry-run -log.level=debug 2>&1 | sed 's/^.*stage/stage/g'

-log.level=debug 2>&1 | sed 's/^.*stage/stage/g are added to enable debug output, direct the output to stdout, and a sed filter to remove some noise from the log lines.

The stdin functionality also works without --dry-run allowing you to feed any logs into Promtail via stdin and send them to Loki

1677 owen-d: Literal Expressions in LogQL
1662 owen-d: Binary operators in LogQL

These two extensions to LogQL now let you execute queries like this:

* `sum(rate({app="foo"}[5m])) * 2` 
* `sum(rate({app="foo"}[5m]))/1e6`

1678 slim-bean: promtail: metrics pipeline count all log lines

Now you can get per-stream line counts as a metric from promtail, useful for seeing which applications log the most

- metrics:
    line_count_total:
      config:
        action: inc
        match_all: true
      description: A running counter of all lines with their corresponding
        labels
      type: Counter

1558 owen-d: ingester.max-chunk-age
1572 owen-d: Feature/query ingesters within

These two configs let you set the max time a chunk can stay in memory in Loki, this is useful to keep memory usage down as well as limit potential loss of data if ingesters crash. Combine this with the query_ingesters_within config and you can have your queriers skip asking the ingesters for data which you know won't still be in memory (older than max_chunk_age).

NOTE Do not set the max_chunk_age too small, the default of 1h is probably a good point for most people. Loki does not perform well when you flush many small chunks (such as when your logs have too much cardinality), setting this lower than 1h risks flushing too many small chunks.

1581 slim-bean: Add sleep to canary reconnect on error

This isn't a feature but it's an important fix, this is the second time our canaries have tried to DDOS our Loki clusters so you should update to prevent them from trying to attack you. Aggressive little things these canaries...

1840 slim-bean: promtail: Retry 429 rate limit errors from Loki, increase default retry limits
1845 wardbekker: throw exceptions on HTTPTooManyRequests and HTTPServerError so FluentD will retry

These two PR's change how 429 HTTP Response codes are handled (Rate Limiting), previously these responses were dropped, now they will be retried for these clients

* Promtail
* Docker logging driver
* Fluent Bit
* Fluentd

This pushes the failure to send logs to two places. First is the retry limits. The defaults in promtail (and thus also the Docker logging driver and Fluent Bit, which share the same underlying code) will retry 429s (and 500s) on an exponential backoff for up to about 8.5 mins on the default configurations. (This can be changed; see the config docs for more info.)

The second place would be the log file itself. At some point, most log files roll based on size or time. Promtail makes an attempt to read a rolled log file but will only try once. If you are very sensitive to lost logs, give yourself really big log files with size-based rolling rules and increase those retry timeouts. This should protect you from Loki server outages or network issues.

Installation:

The components of Loki are currently distributed in plain binary form and as Docker container images. Choose what fits your use-case best.

Docker container:

$ docker pull "grafana/loki:1.4.0"
$ docker pull "grafana/promtail:1.4.0"

Binary

$ curl -O -L "https://github.com/grafana/loki/releases/download/v1.4.0/loki-linux-amd64.zip"
# extract the binary
$ unzip "loki-linux-amd64.zip"
# make sure it is executable
$ chmod a+x "loki-linux-amd64"

Assets 27

22 Jan 19:35

slim-bean

v1.3.0

5e527a0

v1.3.0

With 1.3.0 we are excited to announce several improvements focusing on performance!

First and most significant is the Query Frontend:

1442 cyriltovena: Loki Query Frontend

The query frontend allows for sharding queries by time and dispatching them in parallel to multiple queriers, giving true horizontal scaling ability for queries. Take a look at the jsonnet changes to see how we are deploying this in our production setup. Keep an eye out for a blog post with more information on how the frontend works and more information on this exciting new feature.

In our quest to improve query performance, we discovered that gzip, while good for compression ratio, is not the best for speed. So we introduced the ability to select from several different compression algorithms:

1411 cyriltovena: Adds configurable compression algorithms for chunks

We are currently testing out LZ4 and snappy, LZ4 seemed like a good fit however we found that it didn't always compress the same data to the same output which was causing some troubles for another important improvement:

1438 pstibrany: pkg/ingester: added sync period flags

Extending on the work done by @bboreham on Cortex, @pstibrany added a few new flags and code to synchronize chunks between ingesters, which reduces the number of chunks persisted to object stores and therefore also reduces the number of chunks loaded on queries and the amount of de-duplication work which needs to be done.

As mentioned above, LZ4 was in some cases compressing the same data with a different result which was interfering with this change, we are still investigating the cause of this issue (It may be in how we implemented something, or may be in the compression code itself). For now we have switched to snappy which has seen a reduction in data written to the object store from almost 3x the source data (with a replication factor of 3) to about 1.5x, saving a lot of duplicated log storage!

Another valuable change related to chunks:

1406 slim-bean: allow configuring a target chunk size in compressed bytes

With this change you can set a chunk_target_size and Loki will attempt to fill a chunk to approx that size before flushing (previously a chunk size was a hard coded 10 blocks where the default block size is 262144 bytes). Larger chunks are beneficial for a few reasons, mainly on reducing API calls to your object store when performing queries, but also in reducing overhead in a few places, especially when processing very high volume log streams.

Another big improvement is the introduction of accurate rate limiting when running microservices:

1486 pracucci: Add ingestion rate global limit support

Previously the rate limit was applied at each distributor, however with traffic split over many distributors the limit would need to be adjusted accordingly. This meant that scaling up distributors required changing the limit. Now this information is communicated between distributors such that the limit should be applied accurately regardless of the number of distributors.

And last but not least on the notable changes list is a new feature for Promtail:

1275 bastjan: pkg/promtail: IETF Syslog (RFC5424) Support

With this change Promtail can receive syslogs via TCP! Thanks to @bastjan for all the hard work on this submission!

Important things to note:

1519 Changes a core behavior in Loki regarding logs with duplicate content AND duplicate timestamps, previously Loki would store logs with duplicate timestamps and content, moving forward logs with duplicate content AND timestamps will be silently ignored. Mainly this change is to prevent duplicates that appear when a batch is retried (the first entry in the list would be inserted again, now it will be ignored). Logs with the same timestamp and different content will still be accepted.
1486 Deprecated -distributor.limiter-reload-period flag / distributor's limiter_reload_period config option.

As always, the full list of changes can be found in the CHANGELOG!

Installation:

The components of Loki are currently distributed in plain binary form and as Docker container images. Choose what fits your use-case best.

Docker container:

$ docker pull "grafana/loki:v1.3.0"
$ docker pull "grafana/promtail:v1.3.0"

Binary

$ curl -O -L "https://github.com/grafana/loki/releases/download/v1.3.0/loki-linux-amd64.zip"
# extract the binary
$ unzip "loki-linux-amd64.zip"
# make sure it is executable
$ chmod a+x "loki-linux-amd64"

Assets 25

09 Dec 16:28

slim-bean

v1.2.0

ccef3da

v1.2.0

One week has passed since the last Loki release, and it's time for a new one!

Notable Changes

We have continued our work making our API Prometheus-compatible. The key
changes centered around API compatibility are:

1370 slim-bean: Change /loki/api/v1/label to loki/api/v1/labels
1381 owen-d: application/x-www-form-urlencoded support

Meanwhile, @pstibrany has done great work ensuring that Loki handles hash
collisions properly:

1247 pstibrany: pkg/ingester: handle labels mapping to the same fast fingerprint.

As always, the full list of changes can be found in the CHANGELOG!

Installation:

The components of Loki are currently distributed in plain binary form and as Docker container images. Choose what fits your use-case best.

Docker container:

$ docker pull "grafana/loki:v1.2.0"
$ docker pull "grafana/promtail:v1.2.0"

Binary

$ curl -O -L "https://github.com/grafana/loki/releases/download/v1.2.0/loki-linux-amd64.zip"
# extract the binary
$ unzip "loki-linux-amd64.zip"
# make sure it is executable
$ chmod a+x "loki-linux-amd64"

Assets 25

04 Dec 18:39

slim-bean

v1.1.0

191f87a

v1.1.0

It's been a busy 2 weeks since the 1.0.0 release and quite a few important PR's have been merged to Loki.

The most significant:

1322 rfratto: Fix v1 label API to be Prometheus-compatible

Some might call this a breaking change, we are instead calling it a bug fix as our goal was to be prometheus compatible and we were not 😃

But please be aware if you are using the /loki/api/v1/label or /loki/api/v1/label/<name>/values the JSON result will be different in 1.1.0

Old result:

{
  "values": [
    "label1",
    "label2",
    "labeln"
  ]
}

New result:

{
  "status": "success",
  "data": [
    "label1",
    "label2",
    "labeln"
  ]
}

ALSO IMPORTANT

1160 daixiang0: replace gzip with zip

Binaries will now be zipped instead of gzipped as many people voiced their opinion that zip is likely to be installed on more systems by default.

If you had existing automation to download and install binaries this will have to be updated to use zip instead of gzip

Notable Fixes and Improvements

Broken version info in startup log message:

1095 pstibrany: Makefile changes to allow easy builds with or without vendoring. Also fixes version bug for both cases.
The hashing algorithm used to calculate the hash for a stream was creating hash collisions in some instances.
Please Note this is just one part of the fix and is only in Promtail, the second part for Loki can be tracked in PR1247 which didn't quite make the cut for 1.1.0 and will be in 1.2.0:

1254 pstibrany: pkg/promtail/client: Handle fingerprint hash collisions
Thank you @putrasattvika for finding and fixing an important bug where logs were some logs were missed in a query shortly after a flush!

1299 putrasattvika: storage: fix missing logs with batched chunk iterator
Thank you @danieldabate for helping to again improve our API to be more Prometheus compatible:

1355 danieldabate: HTTP API: Support duration and float formats for step parameter
LogQL will support duration formats that are not typically handled by Go like [1d] or [1w]

1357 cyriltovena: Supports same duration format in LogQL as Prometheus

The full list of changes can be found in the CHANGELOG

Installation:

The components of Loki are currently distributed in plain binary form and as Docker container images. Choose what fits your use-case best.

Docker container:

$ docker pull "grafana/loki:v1.1.0"
$ docker pull "grafana/promtail:v1.1.0"

Binary

$ curl -O -L "https://github.com/grafana/loki/releases/download/v1.1.0/loki-linux-amd64.zip"
# extract the binary
$ unzip "loki-linux-amd64.zip"
# make sure it is executable
$ chmod a+x "loki-linux-amd64"

Assets 25

20 Nov 05:47

slim-bean

v1.0.0

03c15a6

v1.0.0

🎉 Nearly a year since Loki was announced at KubeCon in Seattle 2018 we are very excited to announce the 1.0.0 release of Loki! 🎉

A lot has happened since the announcement, the project just recently passed 1000 commits by 138 contributors over 700+ PR's accumulating over 7700 GitHub stars!

Internally at Grafana Labs we have been using Loki to monitor all of our infrastructure and ingest around 1.5TB/10 billion log lines a day. Since the v0.2.0 release we have found Loki to be reliable and stable in our environments.

We are comfortable with the state of the project in our production environments and think it's time to promote Loki to a non-beta release to communicate to everyone that they should feel comfortable using Loki in their production environments too.
API Stability

With the 1.0.0 release our intent is to try to follow Semver rules regarding stability with some aspects of Loki, focusing mainly on the operating experience of Loki as an application. That is to say we are not planning any major changes to the HTTP API, and anything breaking would likely be accompanied by a major release with backwards compatibility support.

We are currently NOT planning on maintaining Go API stability with this release, if you are importing Loki as a library you should be prepared for any kind of change, including breaking, even in minor or bugfix releases.

Loki is still a young and active project and there might be some breaking config changes in non-major releases, rest assured this will be clearly communicated and backwards or overlapping compatibility will be provided if possible.

The full list of changes for this release can be found in the CHANGELOG

Installation:

The components of Loki are currently distributed in plain binary form and as Docker container images. Choose what fits your use-case best.

Docker container:

$ docker pull "grafana/loki:v1.0.0"
$ docker pull "grafana/promtail:v1.0.0"

Binary:

Choose from the assets below for the application and architecture matching your system.

Example for Loki on the linux operating system and amd64 architecture:

# curl -L "https://github.com/grafana/loki/releases/download/v1.0.0/loki-linux-amd64.gz

# extract the binary
$ gunzip "loki-linux-amd64.gz"

# make sure it is executable
$ chmod a+x "loki-linux-amd64"

Assets 25

24 Oct 17:03

slim-bean

v0.4.0

e3a4814

v0.4.0

This is release v0.4.0 of Loki.

EDIT 2019/10/25:

PR 948 introduces more limit configurations on Loki and you may find the defaults too low for your installation resulting in rate limiting on the clients writing to Loki which was not happening prior to v0.4.0. The limits can be configured higher to avoid this, more info on limits can be found here.

Limits are mostly useful for multi-tenant installations, however they can be useful in single tenant and even single binary installations as a mechanism to help keep Loki's resources constrained. We are discussing if the current defaults are too low and/or if they should be removed entirely from the Helm installation.

Relevant issues #1200 and #1199

Notable changes:

Please see the CHANGELOG for full release notes.

With PR 654 @cyriltovena added a really exciting new capability to Loki, a Prometheus compatible API with support for running metric style queries against your logs! Take a look at how to write metric queries for logs

PLEASE NOTE: To use metric style queries in the current Grafana release 6.4.x you will need to add Loki as a Prometheus datasource in addition to having it as a Log datasource and you will have to select the correct source for querying logs vs metrics, coming soon Grafana will support both logs and metric queries directly to the Loki datasource!
PR 1022 (and a few others) @joe-elliott added a new set of HTTP endpoints in conjunction with the work @cyriltovena to create a Prometheus compatible API as well as improve how labels/timestamps are handled

IMPORTANT: The new /api/v1/* endpoints contain breaking changes on the query paths (push path is unchanged) Eventually the /api/prom/* endpoints will be removed
PR 847 owes a big thanks to @cosmo0920 for contributing his Fluent Bit go plugin, now loki has Fluent Bit plugin support!!
PR 982 was a couple weeks of painstaking work by @rfratto for a much needed improvement to Loki's docs! Check them out!
PR 980 by @sh0rez improved how flags and config file's are loaded to honor a more traditional order of precedence:
1. Defaults
2. Config file
3. User-supplied flag values (command line arguments)
PLEASE NOTE: This is potentially a breaking change if you were passing command line arguments that also existed in a config file in which case the order they are given priority now has changed!
PR 1062 and 1089 have moved Loki from Dep to Go Modules and to Go 1.13

Installation:

The components of Loki are currently distributed in plain binary form and as Docker container images. Choose what fits your use-case best.

Binary:

# download a binary (adapt app, os and arch as needed)
$ curl -fSL -o "/usr/local/bin/loki.gz" "https://github.com/grafana/loki/releases/download/v0.4.0/loki-linux-amd64.gz"
$ gunzip "/usr/local/bin/loki.gz"

# make sure it is executable
$ chmod a+x "/usr/local/bin/loki"

Docker container:

$ docker pull "grafana/loki:v0.4.0"
$ docker pull "grafana/promtail:v0.4.0"

Assets 25

18 Aug 15:07

slim-bean

v0.3.0

c673380

v0.3.0

This is release v0.3.0 of Loki.

Notable changes:

Please see the CHANGELOG for full release notes.

Loki sees readiness probes added for the queriers and distributors (for running Loki in microservices mode), some cleanup and improvement to the live tailing code, fix panic when ingesters are removed while being live tailed, and a couple bugs around chunk handling.

The promtail amd64 image now supports reading Systemd journal files. This has been a struggle as their only exists C libraries for reading the journal file which requires using CGO and an image with systemd packages. For now we have switched to a debian image for promtail which has the necessary systemd files. Currently however cross compiling for ARM is too much of a struggle and we have deferred this for when we switch to the native image building with the drone.io CI system, at which point we will have both amd64 and arm promtail images which can read the Systemd journal.

As just mentioned there has been a big effort to offload building images from circle ci to drone.io where we have access to native arm containers for building arm images without cross compiling. Drone also seems to be building much faster. Currently we are building in both CI systems but soon will switch the image building to drone.

Installation:

The components of Loki are currently distributed in plain binary form and as Docker container images. Choose what fits your use-case best.

Binary:

# download a binary (adapt app, os and arch as needed)
$ curl -fSL -o "/usr/local/bin/loki.gz" "https://github.com/grafana/loki/releases/download/v0.3.0/loki_linux_amd64.gz"
$ gunzip "/usr/local/bin/loki.gz"

# make sure it is executable
$ chmod a+x "/usr/local/bin/loki"

Docker container:

$ docker pull "grafana/loki:v0.3.0"
$ docker pull "grafana/promtail:v0.3.0"

Assets 19

02 Aug 19:19

slim-bean

v0.2.0

321b928

v0.2.0

This is release v0.2.0 of Loki.

Notable changes:

There were over 100 PR's merged since 0.1.0 was released. Please see the CHANGELOG for a more complete list.

A few of the most notable improvements:

There were some significant improvements in memory handling and performance of Loki:

Loki: 713 Storage memory improvement.
Loki: 782 Performance improvement: Query storage by iterating through chunks in batches.
Loki: 788 Querier timeouts.
Loki: 794 Support ingester chunk transfer on shutdown.

Additionally, labels are now fetched from storage for the requested timeframe so you are no longer limited to only retrieving labels of what was still in memory:

Loki: 521 Query label values and names are now fetched from the store.

Please note this introduces a potential new issue if you're asking for labels across a large number of streams over a large timeframe, which causes a large amount of chunks to be loaded. A fix for this is currently being worked out.

Several additions were made to the log processing pipeline:

Pipeline: 738 Added a template stage for manipulating label values.
Pipeline: 732 Support for Unix timestamps.
Pipeline: 760 Support timestamps without year.

A docker logging plugin was created to allow docker containers to send logs directly to Loki:

Docker-Plugin: 663 Created a Docker logging driver plugin.

And starting with this release there are now multi-architecture docker containers and binaries:

Build: 668,762 Build multiple architecture containers.

Installation:

The components of Loki are currently distributed in plain binary form and as Docker container images. Choose what fits your use-case best.

Binary:

# download a binary (adapt app, os and arch as needed)
$ curl -fSL -o "/usr/local/bin/loki.gz" "https://github.com/grafana/loki/releases/download/v0.2.0/loki_linux_amd64.gz"
$ gunzip "/usr/local/bin/loki.gz"

# make sure it is executable
$ chmod a+x "/usr/local/bin/loki"

Docker container:

$ docker pull "grafana/loki:v0.2.0"
$ docker pull "grafana/promtail:v0.2.0"

Assets 18

03 Jun 21:27

slim-bean

v0.1.0

4439828

v0.1.0

Loki Beta Release 1 🎉

Note: If you had been using the pipeline_stages in promtail which was introduced about a week ago, there were some breaking changes to this, please see here for information on the new config.

Getting Started

Assets 4

Releases: grafana/loki

v1.4.1

Important Notes

Notable changes:

Installation:

Docker container:

Binary

v1.4.0

Important Notes

Notable Features

Installation:

Docker container:

Binary

v1.3.0

Installation:

Docker container:

Binary

v1.2.0

Notable Changes

Installation:

Docker container:

Binary

v1.1.0

Notable Fixes and Improvements

Installation:

Docker container:

Binary

v1.0.0

Installation:

Docker container:

Binary:

v0.4.0

EDIT 2019/10/25:

Notable changes:

Installation:

Binary:

Docker container:

v0.3.0

Notable changes:

Installation:

Binary:

Docker container:

v0.2.0

Notable changes:

Installation:

Binary:

Docker container:

v0.1.0

Loki Beta Release 1 🎉