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.write
loki.write
receives log entries from other loki components and sends them
over the network using Loki’s logproto
format.
Multiple loki.write
components can be specified by giving them
different labels.
Usage
loki.write "LABEL" {
endpoint {
url = REMOTE_WRITE_URL
}
}
Arguments
loki.write
supports the following arguments:
Name | Type | Description | Default | Required |
---|---|---|---|---|
max_streams | int | Maximum number of active streams. | 0 (no limit) | no |
external_labels | map(string) | Labels to add to logs sent over the network. | no |
Blocks
The following blocks are supported inside the definition of
loki.write
:
Hierarchy | Block | Description | Required |
---|---|---|---|
endpoint | endpoint | Location to send logs to. | no |
wal | wal | Write-ahead log configuration. | no |
endpoint > basic_auth | basic_auth | Configure basic_auth for authenticating to the endpoint. | no |
endpoint > authorization | authorization | Configure generic authorization to the endpoint. | no |
endpoint > oauth2 | oauth2 | Configure OAuth2 for authenticating to the endpoint. | no |
endpoint > oauth2 > tls_config | tls_config | Configure TLS settings for connecting to the endpoint. | no |
endpoint > tls_config | tls_config | Configure TLS settings for connecting to the endpoint. | no |
The >
symbol indicates deeper levels of nesting. For example, endpoint > basic_auth
refers to a basic_auth
block defined inside an
endpoint
block.
endpoint block
The endpoint
block describes a single location to send logs to. Multiple
endpoint
blocks can be provided to send logs to multiple locations.
The following arguments are supported:
Name | Type | Description | Default | Required |
---|---|---|---|---|
url | string | Full URL to send logs to. | yes | |
name | string | Optional name to identify this endpoint with. | no | |
headers | map(string) | Extra headers to deliver with the request. | no | |
batch_wait | duration | Maximum amount of time to wait before sending a batch. | "1s" | no |
batch_size | string | Maximum batch size of logs to accumulate before sending. | "1MiB" | no |
remote_timeout | duration | Timeout for requests made to the URL. | "10s" | no |
tenant_id | string | The tenant ID used by default to push logs. | no | |
min_backoff_period | duration | Initial backoff time between retries. | "500ms" | no |
max_backoff_period | duration | Maximum backoff time between retries. | "5m" | no |
max_backoff_retries | int | Maximum number of retries. | 10 | no |
bearer_token | secret | Bearer token to authenticate with. | no | |
bearer_token_file | string | File containing a bearer token to authenticate with. | no | |
proxy_url | string | HTTP proxy to proxy requests through. | no | |
follow_redirects | bool | Whether redirects returned by the server should be followed. | true | no |
enable_http2 | bool | Whether HTTP2 is supported for requests. | true | no |
retry_on_http_429 | bool | Retry when an HTTP 429 status code is received. | true | no |
At most one of the following can be provided:
If no tenant_id
is provided, the component assumes that the Loki instance at
endpoint
is running in single-tenant mode and no X-Scope-OrgID header is
sent.
When multiple endpoint
blocks are provided, the loki.write
component
creates a client for each. Received log entries are fanned-out to these clients
in succession. That means that if one client is bottlenecked, it may impact
the rest.
Endpoints can be named for easier identification in debug metrics by using the
name
argument. If the name
argument isn’t provided, a name is generated
based on a hash of the endpoint settings.
The retry_on_http_429
argument specifies whether HTTP 429
status code
responses should be treated as recoverable errors; other HTTP 4xx
status code
responses are never considered recoverable errors. When retry_on_http_429
is
enabled, the retry mechanism will be governed by the backoff configuration specified through min_backoff_period
, max_backoff_period
and max_backoff_retries
attributes.
basic_auth block
Name | Type | Description | Default | Required |
---|---|---|---|---|
password_file | string | File containing the basic auth password. | no | |
password | secret | Basic auth password. | no | |
username | string | Basic auth username. | no |
password
and password_file
are mutually exclusive, and only one can be provided inside a basic_auth
block.
authorization block
Name | Type | Description | Default | Required |
---|---|---|---|---|
credentials_file | string | File containing the secret value. | no | |
credentials | secret | Secret value. | no | |
type | string | Authorization type, for example, “Bearer”. | no |
credential
and credentials_file
are mutually exclusive, and only one can be provided inside an authorization
block.
oauth2 block
Name | Type | Description | Default | Required |
---|---|---|---|---|
client_id | string | OAuth2 client ID. | no | |
client_secret_file | string | File containing the OAuth2 client secret. | no | |
client_secret | secret | OAuth2 client secret. | no | |
endpoint_params | map(string) | Optional parameters to append to the token URL. | no | |
proxy_url | string | Optional proxy URL for OAuth2 requests. | no | |
scopes | list(string) | List of scopes to authenticate with. | no | |
token_url | string | URL to fetch the token from. | no |
client_secret
and client_secret_file
are mutually exclusive, and only one can be provided inside an oauth2
block.
The oauth2
block may also contain a separate tls_config
sub-block.
tls_config block
Name | Type | Description | Default | Required |
---|---|---|---|---|
ca_pem | string | CA PEM-encoded text to validate the server with. | no | |
ca_file | string | CA certificate to validate the server with. | no | |
cert_pem | string | Certificate PEM-encoded text for client authentication. | no | |
cert_file | string | Certificate file for client authentication. | no | |
insecure_skip_verify | bool | Disables validation of the server certificate. | no | |
key_file | string | Key file for client authentication. | no | |
key_pem | secret | Key PEM-encoded text for client authentication. | no | |
min_version | string | Minimum acceptable TLS version. | no | |
server_name | string | ServerName extension to indicate the name of the server. | no |
The following pairs of arguments are mutually exclusive and can’t both be set simultaneously:
ca_pem
andca_file
cert_pem
andcert_file
key_pem
andkey_file
When configuring client authentication, both the client certificate (using
cert_pem
or cert_file
) and the client key (using key_pem
or key_file
)
must be provided.
When min_version
is not provided, the minimum acceptable TLS version is
inherited from Go’s default minimum version, TLS 1.2. If min_version
is
provided, it must be set to one of the following strings:
"TLS10"
(TLS 1.0)"TLS11"
(TLS 1.1)"TLS12"
(TLS 1.2)"TLS13"
(TLS 1.3)
wal block (experimental)
The optional wal
block configures the Write-Ahead Log (WAL) used in the Loki remote-write client. To enable the WAL,
you must include the wal
block in your configuration. When the WAL is enabled, the log entries sent to the loki.write
component are first written to a WAL under the dir
directory and then read into the remote-write client. This process
provides durability guarantees when an entry reaches this component. The client knows when to read from the WAL using the
following two mechanisms:
- The WAL-writer side of the
loki.write
component notifies the reader side that new data is available. - The WAL-reader side periodically checks if there is new data, increasing the wait time exponentially between
min_read_frequency
andmax_read_frequency
.
The WAL is located inside a component-specific directory relative to the
storage path Grafana Agent is configured to use. See the
agent run
documentation for how to change the storage path.
The following arguments are supported:
Name | Type | Description | Default | Required |
---|---|---|---|---|
enabled | bool | Whether to enable the WAL. | false | no |
max_segment_age | duration | Maximum time a WAL segment should be allowed to live. Segments older than this setting will be eventually deleted. | "1h" | no |
min_read_frequency | duration | Minimum backoff time in the backup read mechanism. | "250ms" | no |
max_read_frequency | duration | Maximum backoff time in the backup read mechanism. | "1s" | no |
Exported fields
The following fields are exported and can be referenced by other components:
Name | Type | Description |
---|---|---|
receiver | LogsReceiver | A value that other components can use to send log entries to. |
Component health
loki.write
is only reported as unhealthy if given an invalid
configuration.
Debug information
loki.write
does not expose any component-specific debug
information.
Debug metrics
loki_write_encoded_bytes_total
(counter): Number of bytes encoded and ready to send.loki_write_sent_bytes_total
(counter): Number of bytes sent.loki_write_dropped_bytes_total
(counter): Number of bytes dropped because failed to be sent to the ingester after all retries.loki_write_sent_entries_total
(counter): Number of log entries sent to the ingester.loki_write_dropped_entries_total
(counter): Number of log entries dropped because they failed to be sent to the ingester after all retries.loki_write_request_duration_seconds
(histogram): Duration of sent requests.loki_write_batch_retries_total
(counter): Number of times batches have had to be retried.loki_write_stream_lag_seconds
(gauge): Difference between current time and last batch timestamp for successful sends.
Examples
The following examples show you how to create loki.write
components that send log entries to different destinations.
Send log entries to a local Loki instance
You can create a loki.write
component that sends your log entries to a local Loki instance:
loki.write "local" {
endpoint {
url = "http://loki:3100/loki/api/v1/push"
}
}
Send log entries to a managed service
You can create a loki.write
component that sends your log entries to a managed service, for example, Grafana Cloud. The Loki username and Grafana Cloud API Key are injected in this example through environment variables.
loki.write "default" {
endpoint {
url = "https://logs-xxx.grafana.net/loki/api/v1/push"
basic_auth {
username = env("LOKI_USERNAME")
password = env("GRAFANA_CLOUD_API_KEY")
}
}
}
Technical details
loki.write
uses snappy for compression.
Any labels that start with __
will be removed before sending to the endpoint.