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.
loki.source.file
loki.source.file
reads log entries from files and forwards them to other
loki.*
components.
Multiple loki.source.file
components can be specified by giving them
different labels.
Usage
loki.source.file "LABEL" {
targets = TARGET_LIST
forward_to = RECEIVER_LIST
}
Arguments
The component starts a new reader for each of the given targets
and fans out
log entries to the list of receivers passed in forward_to
.
loki.source.file
supports the following arguments:
Name | Type | Description | Default | Required |
---|---|---|---|---|
targets | list(map(string)) | List of files to read from. | yes | |
forward_to | list(LogsReceiver) | List of receivers to send log entries to. | yes |
Blocks
The loki.source.file
component doesn’t support any inner blocks and is
configured fully through arguments.
Exported fields
loki.source.file
does not export any fields.
Component health
loki.source.file
is only reported as unhealthy if given an invalid
configuration.
Debug information
loki.source.file
exposes some target-level debug information per reader:
- The tailed path.
- Whether the reader is currently running.
- What is the last recorded read offset in the positions file.
Debug metrics
loki_source_file_read_bytes_total
(gauge): Number of bytes read.loki_source_file_file_bytes_total
(gauge): Number of bytes total.loki_source_file_read_lines_total
(counter): Number of lines read.loki_source_file_encoding_failures_total
(counter): Number of encoding failures.loki_source_file_files_active_total
(gauge): Number of active files.
Component behavior
Each element in the list of targets
as a set of key-value pairs called
labels.
The set of targets can either be static, or dynamically provided periodically
by a service discovery component. The special label __path__
must always be
present and must point to the absolute path of the file to read from.
The __path__
value is available as the filename
label to each log entry
the component reads. All other labels starting with a double underscore are
considered internal and are removed from the log entries before they’re
passed to other loki.*
components.
The component uses its data path (a directory named after the domain’s
fully qualified name) to store its positions file. The positions file is used
to store read offsets, so that in case of a component or Agent restart,
loki.source.file
can pick up tailing from the same spot.
If a file is removed from the targets
list, its positions file entry is also
removed. When it’s added back on, loki.source.file
starts reading it from the
beginning.
Example
This example collects log entries from the files specified in the targets
argument and forwards them to a loki.write
component to be written to Loki.
loki.source.file "tmpfiles" {
targets = [
{__path__ = "/tmp/foo.txt", "color" = "pink"},
{__path__ = "/tmp/bar.txt", "color" = "blue"},
{__path__ = "/tmp/baz.txt", "color" = "grey"},
]
forward_to = [loki.write.local.receiver]
}
loki.write "local" {
endpoint {
url = "loki:3100/api/v1/push"
}
}