← Directory

GrafanaPromtail

Promtail is an agent which ships the contents of local logs to a private Loki instance or Grafana Cloud.

  • Network Services
  • Tools & Utilities
Promtail is an agent which ships the contents of local logs to a private Loki instance or Grafana Cloud. It is usually deployed to every machine that has applications needed to be monitored. It primarily: Discovers targets Attaches labels to log streams Pushes them to the Loki instance. Currently, Promtail can tail logs from two sources: local log files and the systemd journal (on AMD64 machines only). Promtail supports receiving IETF Syslog (RFC5424) messages from a tcp stream: (https://github.com/grafana/loki/blob/v1.5.0/docs/clients/promtail/scraping.md#syslog-receiver) NOTE: Download the config.yml file from https://github.com/natcoso9955/Unraid-docker/blob/master/configs/promtail/config.yml before you start the container. Will need to be placed into your Host Path 1. More info: https://github.com/grafana/loki/blob/master/docs/clients/promtail/configuration.md

Platform availability

Available on 1 of 6 install platforms

  • Unraid
  • TrueNAS (not listed)
  • Umbrel (not listed)
  • ZimaOS (not listed)
  • Proxmox (not listed)
  • Helm (not listed)

Also on Docker Hub

Health score

52/100 Fair

Maintained
No data
Popular
No data
Easy to install
201 install platform, Docker image
Light to run
95512 MB minimum RAM, runs on ARM

Based on 2 of 4 factors.

How is this calculated?

A 0-100 score computed nightly from four factors: maintained (40%: recent commits and steady activity), popular (25%: GitHub stars, log scale), easy to install (20%: platforms, install notes, setup guides, Docker image) and light to run (15%: minimum RAM, ARM support). Factors without data are left out and the rest are rescaled.

Availability: platform listings confirmed today, links checked 11 days ago

No GitHub repository data collected yet.

Resources & Compatibility

Minimum requirements: 512 MB RAM, 1 CPU core(s), 10 GB disk. ARM (e.g. Raspberry Pi) is supported.

Checked 10 days ago - source: Docker Hub image tags and published docs

First-install notes

No first-install notes yet.

Alternatives

No alternatives collected yet.

Common questions

Do I have to move away from Promtail to send logs to Loki?

Yes, if you are currently using Promtail, you must migrate to Alloy or another supported client. The Alloy migration documentation includes a tool that converts a Promtail configuration to an Alloy configuration with a single command.

What Promtail issue was reported on a bare-metal Loki setup?

A bare-metal Grafana Loki and Promtail setup was reported with pipeline_stages not working. The post frames it as a specific configuration issue to troubleshoot.

Is there a Docker-focused example for visualizing logs with Promtail and Loki?

The source covers a log visualization setup using Grafana, Loki, Promtail, and Docker. It is described as helpful for building a setup around Dockerized services.

Can logs be sent from Grafana Agent to Promtail and then to Loki in a self-hosted Grafana setup?

A community user on Grafana v10 described the goal of sending logs via Grafana Agent to Promtail and then to Loki. The snippet shows the intended flow but does not provide a confirmed solution.

Answers sourced from community.grafana.com, grafana.com, www.reddit.com, www.reddit.com

Community

Collected 4 days ago - public community threads