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Caution

Grafana Alloy is the new name for our distribution of the OTel collector. Grafana Agent has been deprecated and is in Long-Term Support (LTS) through October 31, 2025. Grafana Agent will reach an End-of-Life (EOL) on November 1, 2025. Read more about why we recommend migrating to Grafana Alloy.

Important: This documentation is about an older version. It's relevant only to the release noted, many of the features and functions have been updated or replaced. Please view the current version.

Open source

discovery.file

discovery.file discovers files on the local filesystem using glob patterns and the doublestar library.

Usage

river
discovery.file "LABEL" {
  path_targets = [{"__path__" = "DOUBLESTAR_PATH"}]
}

Arguments

The following arguments are supported:

NameTypeDescriptionDefaultRequired
path_targetslist(map(string))Targets to expand; looks for glob patterns on the __path__ and __path_exclude__ keys.yes
sync_perioddurationHow often to sync filesystem and targets."10s"no

path_targets uses doublestar style paths.

  • /tmp/**/*.log will match all subfolders of tmp and include any files that end in *.log.
  • /tmp/apache/*.log will match only files in /tmp/apache/ that end in *.log.
  • /tmp/** will match all subfolders of tmp, tmp itself, and all files.

Exported fields

The following fields are exported and can be referenced by other components:

NameTypeDescription
targetslist(map(string))The set of targets discovered from the filesystem.

Each target includes the following labels:

  • __path__: Absolute path to the file.

Component health

discovery.file is only reported as unhealthy when given an invalid configuration. In those cases, exported fields retain their last healthy values.

Debug information

discovery.file does not expose any component-specific debug information.

Debug metrics

discovery.file does not expose any component-specific debug metrics.

Examples

This example discovers all files and folders under /tmp/logs. The absolute paths are used by loki.source.file.files targets.

river
discovery.file "tmp" {
    path_targets = [{"__path__" = "/tmp/logs/**/*.log"}]
}

loki.source.file "files" {
    targets    = discovery.file.tmp.targets
    forward_to = [ /* ... */ ]
}

Kubernetes

This example finds all the logs on pods and monitors them.

river
discovery.kubernetes "k8s" {
  role = "pod"
}

discovery.relabel "k8s" {
  targets = discovery.kubernetes.k8s.targets
 
  rule {
    source_labels = ["__meta_kubernetes_namespace", "__meta_kubernetes_pod_label_name"]
    target_label  = "job"
    separator     = "/"
  }

  rule {
    source_labels = ["__meta_kubernetes_pod_uid", "__meta_kubernetes_pod_container_name"]
    target_label  = "__path__"
    separator     = "/" 
    replacement   = "/var/log/pods/*$1/*.log"
  } 
}

discovery.file "pods" {
    path_targets = discovery.relabel.k8s.output
}

loki.source.file "pods" {
    targets = discovery.file.pods.targets
    forward_to = [loki.write.endpoint.receiver]
}

loki.write "endpoint" {
    endpoint {
        url = "LOKI_PATH"
        basic_auth {
            username = USERNAME
            password = "PASSWORD"
        }
    }
}