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Log entry deletion

Grafana Loki supports the deletion of log entries from a specified stream. Log entries that fall within a specified time window and match an optional line filter are those that will be deleted.

Log entry deletion is supported only when TSDB or BoltDB shipper is configured as the index store.

The compactor component exposes REST endpoints that process delete requests. Hitting the endpoint specifies the streams and the time window. The deletion of the log entries takes place after a configurable cancellation time period expires.

Log entry deletion relies on configuration of the custom logs retention workflow as defined for the compactor. The compactor looks at unprocessed requests which are past their cancellation period to decide whether a chunk is to be deleted or not.

Configuration

Enable log entry deletion by setting retention_enabled to true in the compactor’s configuration and setting and deletion_mode to filter-only or filter-and-delete in the runtime config. delete_request_store also needs to be configured when retention is enabled to process delete requests, this determines the storage bucket that stores the delete requests.

Warning

Be very careful when enabling retention. It is strongly recommended that you also enable versioning on your objects in object storage to allow you to recover from accidental misconfiguration of a retention setting. If you want to enable deletion but not not want to enforce retention, configure the retention_period setting with a value of 0s.

Because it is a runtime configuration, deletion_mode can be set per-tenant, if desired.

With filter-only, log lines matching the query in the delete request are filtered out when querying Loki. They are not removed from storage. With filter-and-delete, log lines matching the query in the delete request are filtered out when querying Loki, and they are also removed from storage.

A delete request may be canceled within a configurable cancellation period. Set the delete_request_cancel_period in the compactor’s YAML configuration or on the command line when invoking Loki. Its default value is 24h.

As long as the compactor.retention_enabled setting is true, the API endpoints will be available. Afterwards, access to the deletion API can be enabled per tenant via the deletion_mode tenant override.