Upgrade Loki
Every attempt is made to keep Grafana Loki backwards compatible, such that upgrades should be low risk and low friction.
Unfortunately Loki is software and software is hard and sometimes we are forced to make decisions between ease of use and ease of maintenance.
If we have any expectation of difficulty upgrading, we will document it here.
As more versions are released it becomes more likely unexpected problems arise moving between multiple versions at once. If possible try to stay current and do sequential updates. If you want to skip versions, try it in a development environment before attempting to upgrade production.
Checking for config changes
Using docker you can check changes between 2 versions of Loki with a command like this:
export OLD_LOKI=2.9.4
export NEW_LOKI=3.0.0
export CONFIG_FILE=local-config.yaml
diff --color=always --side-by-side <(docker run --rm -t -v "${PWD}":/config grafana/loki:${OLD_LOKI} -config.file=/etc/loki/${CONFIG_FILE} -print-config-stderr 2>&1 | sed '/Starting Loki/q' | tr -d '\r') <(docker run --rm -t -v "${PWD}":/config grafana/loki:${NEW_LOKI} -config.file=/etc/loki/${CONFIG_FILE} -print-config-stderr 2>&1 | sed '/Starting Loki/q' | tr -d '\r') | less -R
The tr -d '\r'
is likely not necessary for most people, seems like WSL2 was sneaking in some windows newline characters…
The output is incredibly verbose as it shows the entire internal config struct used to run Loki, you can play around with the diff command if you prefer to only show changes or a different style output.
Main / Unreleased
HTTP API
The API endpoint for instant queries /api/v1/query
now returns a HTTP status 400 (Bad Request) when the provided query
parameter contains a log selector query instead of returning inconsistent results. Please use the range query endpoint
/api/v1/query_range
(Range
type in Grafana Explore) instead.
Configuration
Loki changes the default value of -ruler.alertmanager-use-v2
from false
to true
. Alertmanager APIv1 was deprecated in Alertmanager 0.16.0 and is removed as of 0.27.0.
Experimental Bloom Filters
Note
Experimental features are subject to rapid change and/or removal, which can introduce breaking changes even between minor version. They also don’t follow the deprecation lifecycle of regular features.
The bloom compactor component, which builds bloom filter blocks for query acceleration, has been removed in favor of two new components: bloom planner and bloom builder. Please consult the Query Acceleration with Blooms docs for more information.
CLI arguments (and their YAML counterparts) of per-tenant settings that have been removed as part of this change:
-bloom-compactor.enable-compaction
-bloom-compactor.shard-size
-bloom-compactor.shard-size
-bloom-compactor.shard-size
CLI arguments of per-tenant settings that have been moved to a different prefix as part of this change:
-bloom-compactor.max-page-size
changed to-bloom-builder.max-page-size
-bloom-compactor.max-block-size
changed to-bloom-builder.max-block-size
-bloom-compactor.ngram-length
changed to-bloom-builder.ngram-length
-bloom-compactor.ngram-skip
changed to-bloom-builder.ngram-skip
-bloom-compactor.false-positive-rate
changed to-bloom-builder.false-positive-rate
-bloom-compactor.block-encoding
changed to-bloom-builder.block-encoding
Their YAML counterparts in the limits_config
block are kept identical.
All other CLI arguments (and their YAML counterparts) prefixed with -bloom-compactor.
have been removed.
3.0.0
Note
If you have questions about upgrading to Loki 3.0, please join us on the community Slack in the
#loki-3
channel.Or leave a comment on this Github Issue.
Tip
If you have not yet migrated to TSDB, do so before you upgrade to Loki 3.0.
Loki 3.0 is a major version increase and comes with several breaking changes.
Here is the shortlist of things we think most people may encounter:
- Structured metadata is enabled by default and requires
tsdb
andv13
schema or Loki won’t start. Refer to Structured Metadata, Open Telemetry, Schemas and Indexes. - The
shared_store
config is removed. Refer to Removedshared_store
andshared_store_key_prefix
from shipper configuration. - Loki now enforces a max line size of 256KB by default (you can disable this or increase this but this is how Grafana Labs runs Loki). Refer to Changes to default configure values.
- Loki now enforces a max label limit of 15 labels per series, down from 30. Extra labels inflate the size of the index and reduce performance, you should almost never need more than 15 labels. Refer to Changes to default configure values.
- Loki will automatically attempt to populate a
service_name
label on ingestion. Refer toservice_name
label. - There are many metric name changes. Refer to Distributor metric changes, Embedded cache metric changes, and Metrics namespace.
If you would like to see if your existing configuration will work with Loki 3.0:
- In an empty directory on your computer, copy you configuration into a file named
loki-config.yaml
. - Run this command from that directory:
docker run --rm -t -v "${PWD}":/config grafana/loki:3.0.0 -config.file=/config/loki-config.yaml -verify-config=true
Note
If you introduce a new schema_config entry it may cause additional validation errors.
Tip
If you configurepath_prefix
in thecommon
config section this can help save a lot of configuration. Refer to the Common Config Docs.
The Helm chart has gone through some significant changes and has a separate upgrade guide: Upgrading to Helm 6.x.
Loki
Structured Metadata, Open Telemetry, Schemas and Indexes
A flagship feature of Loki 3.0 is native support for the Open Telemetry Protocol (OTLP). This is made possible by a new feature in Loki called Structured Metadata, a place for metadata which doesn’t belong in labels or log lines. OTel resources and attributes are often a great example of data which doesn’t belong in the index nor in the log line.
Structured Metadata is enabled by default in Loki 3.0, however, it requires your active schema be using both the tsdb
index type AND the v13
storage schema. If you are not using both of these you have two options:
- Upgrade your index version and schema version before updating to 3.0, see schema config upgrade.
- Disable Structured Metadata (and therefor OTLP support) and upgrade to 3.0 and perform the schema migration after. This can be done by setting
allow_structured_metadata: false
in thelimits_config
section or set the command line argument-validation.allow-structured-metadata=false
.
service_name
label
Loki 3.0 will automatically assign a service_name
label to all ingested logs by default. A service name is something required by Open Telemetry semantic conventions and is something Grafana Labs is building into our future user interface and query experiences.
Loki will attempt to create the service_name
label by looking for the following labels in this order:
- service
- app
- application
- name
- app_kubernetes_io_name
- container
- container_name
- component
- workload
- job
If no label is found matching the list, a value of unknown_service
is applied.
You can change this list by providing a list of labels to discover_service_name
in the limits_config block.
Note
If you are already using aservice_label
, Loki will not make a new assignment.
You can disable this by providing an empty value for discover_service_name
.
Removed shared_store
and shared_store_key_prefix
from shipper configuration
The following CLI flags and the corresponding YAML settings to configure shared store for TSDB and BoltDB shippers are now removed:
-boltdb.shipper.shared-store
-tsdb.shipper.shared-store
Going forward the object_store
setting in the period_config will be used to configure the store for the index.
This enforces chunks and index files to reside together in the same storage bucket for a given period.
We are removing the shared store setting in an effort to simplify storage configuration and reduce the possibility for misconfiguration.
Warning
With this change Loki no longer allows storing chunks and indexes for a given period in different storage buckets. This is a breaking change for setups that store chunks and indexes in different storage buckets by setting-boltdb.shipper.shared-store
or-tsdb.shipper.shared-store
to a value different fromobject_store
inperiod_config
.
- If you have not configured
-boltdb.shipper.shared-store
,-tsdb.shipper.shared-store
or their corresponding YAML setting before, no changes are required as part of the upgrade. - If you have configured
-boltdb.shipper.shared-store
or its YAML setting:- If it matches the value of
object_store
for all the periods that useboltdb-shipper
as index type, no additional changes are required besides removing the usage of the deleted configuration option. - If there is a mismatch, you lose access to the index for periods where
-boltdb.shipper.shared-store
does not matchobject_store
.- To make these indexes queryable, index tables need to moved or copied to the store configured in
object_store
.
- To make these indexes queryable, index tables need to moved or copied to the store configured in
- If it matches the value of
- If you have configured
-tsdb.shipper.shared-store
or its YAML setting:- If it matches the value of
object_store
for all the periods that usetsdb
as index type, no additional changes are required besides removing the usage of the deleted configuration option. - If there is a mismatch, you lose access to the index for periods where
-tsdb.shipper.shared-store
does not matchobject_store
.- To make these indexes queryable, index tables need to moved or copied to the store configured in
object_store
.
- To make these indexes queryable, index tables need to moved or copied to the store configured in
- If it matches the value of
The following CLI flags and the corresponding YAML settings to configure a path prefix for TSDB and BoltDB shippers are now removed:
-boltdb.shipper.shared-store.key-prefix
-tsdb.shipper.shared-store.key-prefix
Path prefix for storing the index can now be configured by setting path_prefix
under index
key in period_config.
This enables users to change the path prefix by adding a new period config.
period_config:
index:
path_prefix: "index/"
period: 24h
Note
path_prefix
only applies to TSDB and BoltDB indexes. This setting has no effect on legacy indexes.
path_prefix
defaults to index/
which is same as the default value of the removed configurations.
- No changes are required if you have not configured
-boltdb.shipper.shared-store.key-prefix
,-tsdb.shipper.shared-store.key-prefix
or the corresponding YAML setting previously. - If you have configured
-boltdb.shipper.shared-store.key-prefix
or its YAML setting to a value other thanindex/
, ensure that all the existing period configs that useboltdb-shipper
as the index havepath_prefix
set to the value previously configured. - If you have configured
-tsdb.shipper.shared-store.key-prefix
or its YAML setting to a value other thanindex/
, ensure that all the existing period configs that usetsdb
as the index have thepath_prefix
set to the value previously configured.
Removed shared_store
and shared_store_key_prefix
from compactor configuration
The following CLI flags and the corresponding YAML settings to configure the shared store and path prefix for compactor are now removed:
-boltdb.shipper.compactor.shared-store
-boltdb.shipper.compactor.shared-store.key-prefix
Going forward compactor will run compaction and retention on all the object stores configured in period configs where the index type is either tsdb
or boltdb-shipper
.
delete_request_store
should be explicitly configured
-compactor.delete-request-store
or its YAML setting should be explicitly configured when retention is enabled, this is required for storing delete requests.
The path prefix under which the delete requests are stored is decided by -compactor.delete-request-store.key-prefix
, it defaults to index/
.
Configuration async_cache_write_back_concurrency
and async_cache_write_back_buffer_size
have been removed
These configurations were redundant with the Background
configuration in the cache-config.
async_cache_write_back_concurrency
can be set with writeback_goroutines
async_cache_write_back_buffer_size
can be set with writeback_buffer
additionally the Background
configuration also lest you set writeback_size_limit
which can be used to set a maximum amount of memory to use for writeback objects vs a count of objects.
Legacy ingester shutdown handler is removed
The already deprecated handler /ingester/flush_shutdown
is removed in favor of /ingester/shutdown?flush=true
.
Ingester configuration max_transfer_retries
is removed.
The setting max_transfer_retries
(-ingester.max-transfer-retries
) is removed in favor of the Write Ahead log (WAL).
It was used to allow transferring chunks to new ingesters when the old ingester was shutting down during a rolling restart.
Alternatives to this setting are:
- A. (Preferred) Enable the WAL and rely on the new ingester to replay the WAL.
- Optionally, you can enable
flush_on_shutdown
(-ingester.flush-on-shutdown
) to flush to long-term storage on shutdowns.
- Optionally, you can enable
- B. Manually flush during shutdowns via the ingester
/shutdown?flush=true
endpoint.
Removed the default
section of the runtime overrides config file.
This was introduced in 2.9 and likely not widely used. This only affects you if you run Loki with a runtime config file AND you had populated the new default
block added in 2.9.
The default
block was removed and instead a top level config now exists in the standard Loki config called operational_config
, you can set default values here for runtime configs.
Configuration use_boltdb_shipper_as_backup
is removed
The setting use_boltdb_shipper_as_backup
(-tsdb.shipper.use-boltdb-shipper-as-backup
) was a remnant from the development of the TSDB storage.
It was used to allow writing to both TSDB and BoltDB when TSDB was still highly experimental.
Since TSDB is now stable and the recommended index type, the setting has become irrelevant and therefore was removed.
The previous default value false
is applied.
Deprecated configuration options are removed
- Removed already deprecated
store.max-look-back-period
CLI flag and the corresponding YAML settings. Usequerier.max-query-lookback
config instead. - Removes already deprecated
-querier.engine.timeout
CLI flag and the corresponding YAML setting. - Also removes the
query_timeout
from the querier YAML section. Instead of configuringquery_timeout
underquerier
, you now configure it in Limits Config. s3.sse-encryption
is removed. AWS now defaults encryption of all buckets to SSE-S3. Usesse.type
to set SSE type.ruler.wal-cleaer.period
is removed. Useruler.wal-cleaner.period
instead.experimental.ruler.enable-api
is removed. Useruler.enable-api
instead.split_queries_by_interval
is removed fromquery_range
YAML section. You can instead configure it in Limits Config.frontend.forward-headers-list
CLI flag and its corresponding YAML setting are removed.frontend.cache-split-interval
CLI flag is removed. Results caching interval is now determined byquerier.split-queries-by-interval
.querier.worker-parallelism
CLI flag and its corresponding yaml setting are now removed as it does not offer additional value to already existingquerier.max-concurrent
. We recommend configuringquerier.max-concurrent
to limit the max concurrent requests processed by the queriers.ruler.evaluation-delay-duration
CLI flag and the corresponding YAML setting are removed.validation.enforce-metric-name
CLI flag and the corresponding YAML setting are removed.boltdb.shipper.compactor.deletion-mode
CLI flag and the corresponding YAML setting are removed. You can instead configure thecompactor.deletion-mode
CLI flag ordeletion_mode
YAML setting in Limits Config.- Compactor CLI flags that use the prefix
boltdb.shipper.compactor.
are removed. You can instead use CLI flags with thecompactor.
prefix.
Legacy ingester shutdown handler is removed
The already deprecated handler /ingester/flush_shutdown
is removed in favor of /ingester/shutdown?flush=true
.
Ingester configuration max_transfer_retries
is removed.
The setting max_transfer_retries
(-ingester.max-transfer-retries
) is removed in favor of the Write Ahead log (WAL).
It was used to allow transferring chunks to new ingesters when the old ingester was shutting down during a rolling restart.
Alternatives to this setting are:
- A. (Preferred) Enable the WAL and rely on the new ingester to replay the WAL.
- Optionally, you can enable
flush_on_shutdown
(-ingester.flush-on-shutdown
) to flush to long-term storage on shutdowns.
- Optionally, you can enable
- B. Manually flush during shutdowns via the ingester
/shutdown?flush=true
endpoint.
Distributor metric changes
The loki_distributor_ingester_append_failures_total
metric has been removed in favour of loki_distributor_ingester_append_timeouts_total
.
This new metric will provide a more clear signal that there is an issue with ingesters, and this metric can be used for high-signal alerting.
Changes to default configuration values in 3.0
configuration | new default | old default | notes |
---|---|---|---|
compactor.delete-max-interval | 24h | 0 | splits the delete requests into intervals no longer than delete_max_interval |
distributor.max-line-size | 256KB | 0 | - |
ingester.sync-period | 1h | 0 | ensures that the chunk cuts for a given stream are synchronized across the ingesters in the replication set. Helps with deduplicating chunks. |
ingester.sync-min-utilization | 0.1 | 0 | - |
frontend.max-querier-bytes-read | 150GB | 0 | - |
frontend.max-cache-freshness | 10m | 1m | - |
frontend.max-stats-cache-freshness | 10m | 0 | - |
frontend.embedded-cache.max-size-mb | 100MB | 1GB | embedded results cache size now defaults to 100MB |
memcached.batchsize | 4 | 1024 | - |
memcached.parallelism | 5 | 100 | - |
querier.compress-http-responses | true | false | compress response if the request accepts gzip encoding |
querier.max-concurrent | 4 | 10 | Consider increasing this if queriers have access to more CPU resources. Note that you risk running into out of memory errors if you set this to a very high value. |
querier.split-queries-by-interval | 1h | 30m | - |
querier.tsdb-max-query-parallelism | 128 | 512 | - |
query-scheduler.max-outstanding-requests-per-tenant | 32000 | 100 | - |
validation.max-label-names-per-series | 15 | 30 | - |
legacy-read-mode | false | true | Deprecated. It will be removed in the next minor release. |
Automatic stream sharding is enabled by default
Automatic stream sharding helps keep the write load of high volume streams balanced across ingesters and helps to avoid hot-spotting. Check out the operations page for more information
More results caching is enabled by default
The TSDB index type has support for caching results for ‘stats’ and ‘volume’ queries which are now enabled by default.
’label’ and ‘series’ requests can be cached now too and this is enabled by default.
All of these are cached to the results_cache
which is configured in the query_range
config section. By default, an in memory cache is used.
Write dedupe cache is deprecated
Write dedupe cache is deprecated because it not required by the newer single store indexes (TSDB and boltdb-shipper). If you using a legacy index type, consider migrating to TSDB (recommended).
Embedded cache metric changes
The following embedded cache metrics are removed. Instead use
loki_cache_fetched_keys
,loki_cache_hits
,loki_cache_request_duration_seconds
which instruments requests made to the configured cache (embeddedcache
,memcached
orredis
).querier_cache_added_total
querier_cache_gets_total
querier_cache_misses_total
The following embedded cache metrics are renamed:
querier_cache_added_new_total
is renamed toloki_embeddedcache_added_new_total
querier_cache_evicted_total
is renamed toloki_embeddedcache_evicted_total
querier_cache_entries
is renamed toloki_embeddedcache_entries
querier_cache_memory_bytes
is renamed toloki_embeddedcache_memory_bytes
Already deprecated metric
querier_cache_stale_gets_total
is now removed.
Metrics namespace
Some Loki metrics started with the prefix cortex_
. In this release they will be changed so they start with loki_
. To keep them at cortex_
change the metrics_namespace
from the default loki
to cortex
. These metrics will be changed:
cortex_distributor_ingester_clients
cortex_dns_failures_total
cortex_dns_lookups_total
cortex_dns_provider_results
cortex_frontend_query_range_duration_seconds_bucket
cortex_frontend_query_range_duration_seconds_count
cortex_frontend_query_range_duration_seconds_sum
cortex_ingester_flush_queue_length
cortex_kv_request_duration_seconds_bucket
cortex_kv_request_duration_seconds_count
cortex_kv_request_duration_seconds_sum
cortex_member_consul_heartbeats_total
cortex_prometheus_last_evaluation_samples
cortex_prometheus_notifications_alertmanagers_discovered
cortex_prometheus_notifications_dropped_total
cortex_prometheus_notifications_errors_total
cortex_prometheus_notifications_latency_seconds
cortex_prometheus_notifications_latency_seconds_count
cortex_prometheus_notifications_latency_seconds_sum
cortex_prometheus_notifications_queue_capacity
cortex_prometheus_notifications_queue_length
cortex_prometheus_notifications_sent_total
cortex_prometheus_rule_evaluation_duration_seconds
cortex_prometheus_rule_evaluation_duration_seconds_count
cortex_prometheus_rule_evaluation_duration_seconds_sum
cortex_prometheus_rule_evaluation_failures_total
cortex_prometheus_rule_evaluations_total
cortex_prometheus_rule_group_duration_seconds
cortex_prometheus_rule_group_duration_seconds_count
cortex_prometheus_rule_group_duration_seconds_sum
cortex_prometheus_rule_group_interval_seconds
cortex_prometheus_rule_group_iterations_missed_total
cortex_prometheus_rule_group_iterations_total
cortex_prometheus_rule_group_last_duration_seconds
cortex_prometheus_rule_group_last_evaluation_timestamp_seconds
cortex_prometheus_rule_group_rules
cortex_query_frontend_connected_schedulers
cortex_query_frontend_queries_in_progress
cortex_query_frontend_retries_bucket
cortex_query_frontend_retries_count
cortex_query_frontend_retries_sum
cortex_query_scheduler_connected_frontend_clients
cortex_query_scheduler_connected_querier_clients
cortex_query_scheduler_inflight_requests
cortex_query_scheduler_inflight_requests_count
cortex_query_scheduler_inflight_requests_sum
cortex_query_scheduler_queue_duration_seconds_bucket
cortex_query_scheduler_queue_duration_seconds_count
cortex_query_scheduler_queue_duration_seconds_sum
cortex_query_scheduler_queue_length
cortex_query_scheduler_running
cortex_ring_member_heartbeats_total
cortex_ring_member_tokens_owned
cortex_ring_member_tokens_to_own
cortex_ring_members
cortex_ring_oldest_member_timestamp
cortex_ring_tokens_total
cortex_ruler_client_request_duration_seconds_bucket
cortex_ruler_client_request_duration_seconds_count
cortex_ruler_client_request_duration_seconds_sum
cortex_ruler_clients
cortex_ruler_config_last_reload_successful
cortex_ruler_config_last_reload_successful_seconds
cortex_ruler_config_updates_total
cortex_ruler_managers_total
cortex_ruler_ring_check_errors_total
cortex_ruler_sync_rules_total
The metrics_namespace
setting is deprecated already. It will be removed in the next minor release. The default prefix will be loki
then.
LogCLI
Store for retrieving remote schema
Previously LogCLI used to fetch remote schema from the store configured in -boltdb.shipper.shared-store
when -remote-schema
is set to true
.
A new CLI flag -schema-store
is introduced as a replacement to configure the store for retrieving remote schema.
2.9.0
Loki
Index gateway shuffle sharding
The index gateway now supports shuffle sharding of index data when running in “ring” mode. The index data is sharded by tenant where each tenant gets assigned a sub-set of all available instances of the index gateways in the ring.
If you configured a high replication factor to accommodate for load, since in the past this was the only option to give a tenant more instances for querying, you should consider reducing the replication factor to a meaningful value for replication (for example, from 12 to 3) and instead set the shard factor for individual tenants as required.
If the global shard factor (no per-tenant) is 0 (default value), the global shard factor is set to replication factor. It can still be overwritten per tenant.
In the context of the index gateway, sharding is synonymous to replication.
Index shipper multi-store support
In previous releases, if you did not explicitly configure -boltdb.shipper.shared-store
, -tsdb.shipper.shared-store
, those values default to the object_store
configured in the latest period_config
of the corresponding index type.
These defaults are removed in favor of uploading indexes to multiple stores. If you do not explicitly configure a shared-store
, the boltdb and tsdb indexes will be shipped to the object_store
configured for that period.
Shutdown marker file
A shutdown marker file can be written by the /ingester/prepare_shutdown
endpoint.
If the new ingester.shutdown_marker_path
config setting has a value that value is used.
If not thecommon.path_prefix
config setting is used if it has a value. Otherwise a warning is shown
in the logs on startup and the /ingester/prepare_shutdown
endpoint will return a 500 status code.
Compactor multi-store support
In previous releases, setting -boltdb.shipper.compactor.shared-store
configured the following:
- store used for managing delete requests.
- store on which index compaction should be performed.
If -boltdb.shipper.compactor.shared-store
was not set, it used to default to the object_store
configured in the latest period_config
that uses either the tsdb or boltdb-shipper index.
Compactor now supports index compaction on multiple buckets/object stores.
And going forward loki will not set any defaults on -boltdb.shipper.compactor.shared-store
, this has a couple of side effects detailed as follows:
store on which index compaction should be performed:
If -boltdb.shipper.compactor.shared-store
is configured by the user, loki would run index compaction only on the store specified by the config.
If not set, compaction would be performed on all the object stores that contain either a boltdb-shipper or tsdb index.
store used for managing delete requests:
A new config option -boltdb.shipper.compactor.delete-request-store
decides where delete requests should be stored. This new option takes precedence over -boltdb.shipper.compactor.shared-store
.
In the case where neither of these options are set, the object_store
configured in the latest period_config
that uses either a tsdb or boltdb-shipper index is used for storing delete requests to ensure pending requests are processed.
logfmt parser non-strict parsing
logfmt parser now performs non-strict parsing which helps scan semi-structured log lines.
It skips invalid tokens and tries to extract as many key/value pairs as possible from the rest of the log line.
If you have a use-case that relies on strict parsing where you expect the parser to throw an error, use | logfmt --strict
to enable strict mode.
logfmt parser doesn’t include standalone keys(keys without a value) in the resulting label set anymore.
You can use --keep-empty
flag to retain them.
Jsonnet
Deprecated PodDisruptionBudget definition has been removed
The policy/v1beta1
API version of PodDisruptionBudget is no longer served as of Kubernetes v1.25.
To support the latest versions of the Kubernetes, it was necessary to replace policy/v1beta1
with the new definition policy/v1
that is available since v1.21.
No impact is expected if you use Kubernetes v1.21 or newer.
Please refer to official migration guide for more details.
2.8.0
Loki
Change in LogQL behavior
When there are duplicate labels in a log line, only the first value will be kept. Previously only the last value was kept.
Default retention_period has changed
This change will affect you if you have:
compactor:
retention_enabled: true
And did not define a retention_period
in limits_config
, thus relying on the previous default of 744h
In this release the default has been changed to 0s
.
A value of 0s
is the same as “retain forever” or “disable retention”.
If, and only if, you wish to retain the previous default of 744h, apply this config.
limits_config:
retention_period: 744h
Note
In previous versions, the zero value of0
or0s
will result in immediate deletion of all logs, only in 2.8 and forward releases does the zero value disable retention.
metrics.go log line subqueries
replaced with splits
and shards
The metrics.go log line emitted for every query had an entry called subqueries
which was intended to represent the amount a query was parallelized on execution.
In the current form it only displayed the count of subqueries generated with the Loki split by time logic and did not include counts for shards.
There wasn’t a clean way to update subqueries to include sharding information and there is value in knowing the difference between the subqueries generated when we split by time vs sharding factors, especially now that TSDB can do dynamic sharding.
In 2.8 we no longer include subqueries
in metrics.go, it does still exist in the statistics API data returned but just for backwards compatibility, the value will always be zero now.
Instead, now you can use splits
to see how many split by time intervals were created and shards
to see the total number of shards created for a query.
Note
Currently not every query can be sharded and a shards value of zero is a good indicator the query was not able to be sharded.
Promtail
The go build tag promtail_journal_enabled
was introduced
The go build tag promtail_journal_enabled
should be passed to include Journal support to the promtail binary.
If you need Journal support you will need to run go build with tag promtail_journal_enabled
:
go build --tags=promtail_journal_enabled ./clients/cmd/promtail
Introducing this tag aims to relieve Linux/CentOS users with CGO enabled from installing libsystemd-dev/systemd-devel libraries if they don’t need Journal support.
Ruler
CLI flag ruler.wal-cleaer.period
deprecated
CLI flag ruler.wal-cleaer.period
is now deprecated and replaced with a typo fix ruler.wal-cleaner.period
.
The yaml configuration remains unchanged:
ruler:
wal_cleaner:
period: 5s
Querier
query-frontend Kubernetes headless service changed to load balanced service
Note
This is relevant only if you are using jsonnet for deploying Loki in Kubernetes.
The query-frontend
Kubernetes service was previously headless and was used for two purposes:
- Distributing the Loki query requests amongst all the available Query Frontend pods.
- Discover IPs of Query Frontend pods from Queriers to connect as workers.
The problem here is that a headless service does not support load balancing and leaves it up to the client to balance the load. Additionally, a load-balanced service does not let us discover the IPs of the underlying pods.
To meet both these requirements, we have made the following changes:
- Changed the existing
query-frontend
Kubernetes service from headless to load-balanced to have a fair load distribution on all the Query Frontend instances. - Added
query-frontend-headless
to discover QF pod IPs from queriers to connect as workers.
If you are deploying Loki with Query Scheduler by setting query_scheduler_enabled config to true
, then there is nothing to do here for this change.
If you are not using Query Scheduler, then to avoid any issues on the Read path until the rollout finishes, it would be good to follow below steps:
- Create just the
query-frontend-headless
service without applying any changes to thequery-frontend
service. - Rollout changes to
queriers
. - Roll out the rest of the changes.
General
Store & Cache Statistics
Statistics are now logged in metrics.go
lines about how long it takes to download chunks from the store, as well as how long it takes to download chunks, index query, and result cache responses from cache.
Example (note the *_download_time
fields):
level=info ts=2022-12-20T15:27:54.858554127Z caller=metrics.go:147 component=frontend org_id=docker latency=fast query="sum(count_over_time({job=\"generated-logs\"}[1h]))" query_type=metric range_type=range length=6h17m48.865587821s start_delta=6h17m54.858533178s end_delta=5.99294552s step=1m30s duration=5.990829396s status=200 limit=30 returned_lines=0 throughput=123MB total_bytes=738MB total_entries=1 store_chunks_download_time=2.319297059s queue_time=2m21.476090991s subqueries=8 cache_chunk_req=81143 cache_chunk_hit=32390 cache_chunk_bytes_stored=1874098 cache_chunk_bytes_fetched=94289610 cache_chunk_download_time=56.96914ms cache_index_req=994 cache_index_hit=710 cache_index_download_time=1.587842ms cache_result_req=7 cache_result_hit=0 cache_result_download_time=380.555µs
These statistics are also displayed when using --stats
with LogCLI.
2.7.0
Loki
Loki Canary Permission
The new push
mode to Loki canary can push logs that are generated by a Loki canary directly to a given Loki URL. Previously, it only wrote to a local file and you needed some agent, such as promtail, to scrape and push it to Loki.
So if you run Loki behind some proxy with different authorization policies to read and write to Loki, then auth credentials we pass to Loki canary now needs to have both READ
and WRITE
permissions.
engine.timeout
and querier.query_timeout
are deprecated
Previously, we had two configurations to define a query timeout: engine.timeout
and querier.query-timeout
.
As they were conflicting and engine.timeout
isn’t as expressive as querier.query-tiomeout
,
we’re deprecating it and moving it to Limits Config limits_config.query_timeout
with same default values.
fifocache
has been renamed
The in-memory fifocache
has been renamed to embedded-cache
. This allows us to replace the implementation (currently a simple FIFO datastructure) with something else in the future without causing confusion
Evenly spread Memcached pods for chunks across kubernetes nodes
We now evenly spread memcached_chunks pods across the available kubernetes nodes, but allowing more than one pod to be scheduled into the same node.
If you want to run at most a single pod per node, set $.memcached.memcached_chunks.use_topology_spread
to false.
While we attempt to schedule at most 1 memcached_chunks pod per Kubernetes node with the topology_spread_max_skew: 1
field,
if no more nodes are available then multiple pods will be scheduled on the same node.
This can potentially impact your service’s reliability so consider tuning these values according to your risk tolerance.
Evenly spread distributors across kubernetes nodes
We now evenly spread distributors across the available kubernetes nodes, but allowing more than one distributors to be scheduled into the same node.
If you want to run at most a single distributors per node, set $._config.distributors.use_topology_spread
to false.
While we attempt to schedule at most 1 distributor per Kubernetes node with the topology_spread_max_skew: 1
field,
if no more nodes are available then multiple distributors will be scheduled on the same node.
This can potentially impact your service’s reliability so consider tuning these values according to your risk tolerance.
Evenly spread queriers across kubernetes nodes
We now evenly spread queriers across the available kubernetes nodes, but allowing more than one querier to be scheduled into the same node.
If you want to run at most a single querier per node, set $._config.querier.use_topology_spread
to false.
While we attempt to schedule at most 1 querier per Kubernetes node with the topology_spread_max_skew: 1
field,
if no more nodes are available then multiple queriers will be scheduled on the same node.
This can potentially impact your service’s reliability so consider tuning these values according to your risk tolerance.
Default value for server.http-listen-port
changed
This value now defaults to 3100, so the Loki process doesn’t require special privileges. Previously, it had been set to port 80, which is a privileged port. If you need Loki to listen on port 80, you can set it back to the previous default using -server.http-listen-port=80
.
docker-compose setup has been updated
The docker-compose setup has been updated to v2.6.0 and includes many improvements.
Notable changes include:
- authentication (multi-tenancy) is enabled by default; you can disable it in
production/docker/config/loki.yaml
by settingauth_enabled: false
- storage is now using Minio instead of local filesystem
- move your current storage into
.data/minio
and it should work transparently
- move your current storage into
- log-generator was added - if you don’t need it, simply remove the service from
docker-compose.yaml
or don’t start the service
Configuration for deletes has changed
The global deletion_mode
option in the compactor configuration moved to runtime configurations.
- The
deletion_mode
option needs to be removed from your compactor configuration - The
deletion_mode
global override needs to be set to the desired mode:disabled
,filter-only
, orfilter-and-delete
. By default,filter-and-delete
is enabled. - Any
allow_delete
per-tenant overrides need to be removed or changed todeletion_mode
overrides with the desired mode.
Metric name for loki_log_messages_total
changed
The name of this metric was changed to loki_internal_log_messages_total
to reduce ambiguity. The previous name is still present but is deprecated.
Usage Report / Telemetry config has changed named
The configuration for anonymous usage statistics reporting to Grafana has changed from usage_report
to analytics
.
TLS cipher_suites
and tls_min_version
have moved
These were previously configurable under server.http_tls_config
and server.grpc_tls_config
separately. They are now under server.tls_cipher_suites
and server.tls_min_version
. These values are also now configurable for individual clients, for example: distributor.ring.etcd
or querier.ingester_client.grpc_client_config
.
ruler.storage.configdb
has been removed
ConfigDB was disallowed as a Ruler storage option back in 2.0. The config struct has finally been removed.
ruler.remote_write.client
has been removed
Can no longer specify a remote write client for the ruler.
Promtail
gcp_push_target_parsing_errors_total
has a new reason
label
The gcp_push_target_parsing_errors_total
GCP Push Target metrics has been added a new label named reason
. This includes detail on what might have caused the parsing to fail.
Windows event logs: now correctly includes user_data
The contents of the user_data
field was erroneously set to the same value as event_data
in previous versions. This was fixed in #7461 and log queries relying on this broken behaviour may be impacted.
2.6.0
Loki
Implementation of unwrapped rate
aggregation changed
The implementation of the rate()
aggregation function changed back to the previous implemention prior to #5013.
This means that the rate per second is calculated based on the sum of the extracted values, instead of the average increase over time.
If you want the extracted values to be treated as Counter metric, you should use the new rate_counter()
aggregation function, which calculates the per-second average rate of increase of the vector.
Default value for azure.container-name
changed
This value now defaults to loki
, it was previously set to cortex
. If you are relying on this container name for your chunks or ruler storage, you will have to manually specify -azure.container-name=cortex
or -ruler.storage.azure.container-name=cortex
respectively.
2.5.0
Loki
split_queries_by_interval
yaml configuration has moved.
It was previously possible to define this value in two places
query_range:
split_queries_by_interval: 10m
and/or
limits_config:
split_queries_by_interval: 10m
In 2.5.0 it can only be defined in the limits_config
section, Loki will fail to start if you do not remove the split_queries_by_interval
config from the query_range
section.
Additionally, it has a new default value of 30m
rather than 0
.
The CLI flag is not changed and remains querier.split-queries-by-interval
.
Dropped support for old Prometheus rules configuration format
Alerting rules previously could be specified in two formats: 1.x format (legacy one, named v0
internally) and 2.x.
We decided to drop support for format 1.x
as it is fairly old and keeping support for it required a lot of code.
In case you’re still using the legacy format, take a look at Alerting Rules for instructions on how to write alerting rules in the new format.
For reference, the newer format follows a structure similar to the one below:
groups:
- name: example
rules:
- alert: HighErrorRate
expr: job:request_latency_seconds:mean5m{job="myjob"} > 0.5
for: 10m
labels:
severity: page
annotations:
summary: High request latency
Meanwhile, the legacy format is a string in the following format:
ALERT <alert name>
IF <expression>
[ FOR <duration> ]
[ LABELS <label set> ]
[ ANNOTATIONS <label set> ]
Changes to default configuration values
parallelise_shardable_queries
under thequery_range
config now defaults totrue
.split_queries_by_interval
under thelimits_config
config now defaults to30m
, it was0s
.max_chunk_age
in theingester
config now defaults to2h
previously it was1h
.query_ingesters_within
under thequerier
config now defaults to3h
, previously it was0s
. Any query (or subquery) that has an end time more than3h
ago will not be sent to the ingesters, this saves work on the ingesters for data they normally don’t contain. If you regularly write old data to Loki you may need to return this value to0s
to always query ingesters.max_concurrent
under thequerier
config now defaults to10
instead of20
.match_max_concurrent
under thefrontend_worker
config now defaults to true, this supersedes theparallelism
setting which can now be removed from your config. Controlling query parallelism of a single process can now be done with thequerier
max_concurrent
setting.flush_op_timeout
under theingester
configuration block now defaults to10m
, increased from10s
. This can help when replaying a large WAL on Loki startup, and avoidmsg="failed to flush" ... context deadline exceeded
errors.
Promtail
gcplog
labels have changed
- Resource labels have been moved from
__<NAME>
to__gcp_resource_labels_<NAME>
e.g. if you previously used__project_id
then you’ll need to update your relabel config to use__gcp_resource_labels_project_id
. resource_type
has been moved to__gcp_resource_type
promtail_log_entries_bytes_bucket
histogram has been removed.
This histogram reports the distribution of log line sizes by file. It has 8 buckets for every file being tailed.
This creates a lot of series and we don’t think this metric has enough value to offset the amount of series genereated so we are removing it.
While this isn’t a direct replacement, two metrics we find more useful are size and line counters configured via pipeline stages, an example of how to configure these metrics can be found in the metrics pipeline stage docs.
added Docker target
log message has been demoted from level=error to level=info
If you have dashboards that depended on the log level, change them to search for the msg="added Docker target"
property.
Jsonnet
Compactor config defined as command line args moved to yaml config
Following 2 compactor configs that were defined as command line arguments in jsonnet are now moved to yaml config:
# Directory where files can be downloaded for compaction.
# CLI flag: -boltdb.shipper.compactor.working-directory
[working_directory: <string>]
# The shared store used for storing boltdb files.
# Supported types: gcs, s3, azure, swift, cos, filesystem.
# CLI flag: -boltdb.shipper.compactor.shared-store
[shared_store: <string>]
2.4.0
The following are important changes which should be reviewed and understood prior to upgrading Loki.
Loki
The following changes pertain to upgrading Loki.
The single binary no longer runs a table-manager
Single binary Loki means running loki with -target=all
which is the default if no -target
flag is passed.
This will impact anyone in the following scenarios:
- Running a single binary Loki with any index type other than
boltdb-shipper
orboltdb
- Relying on retention with the configs
retention_deletes_enabled
andretention_period
Anyone in situation #1 who is not using boltdb-shipper
or boltdb
(e.g. cassandra
or bigtable
) should modify their Loki command to include -target=all,table-manager
this will instruct Loki to run a table-manager for you.
Anyone in situation #2, you have two options, the first (and not recommended) is to run Loki with a table-manager by adding -target=all,table-manager
.
The second and recommended solution, is to use deletes via the compactor:
compactor:
retention_enabled: true
limits_config:
retention_period: [30d]
See the retention docs for more info.
Log messages on startup: proto: duplicate proto type registered:
PR #3842 cyriltovena: Fork cortex chunk storage into Loki.
Since Cortex doesn’t plan to use the chunk
package anymore, we decided to fork it into our storage package to
be able to evolve and modify it easily. However, as a side-effect, we still vendor Cortex which includes this forked
code and protobuf files resulting in log messages like these at startup:
2021-11-04 15:30:02.437911 I | proto: duplicate proto type registered: purgeplan.DeletePlan
2021-11-04 15:30:02.437936 I | proto: duplicate proto type registered: purgeplan.ChunksGroup
2021-11-04 15:30:02.437939 I | proto: duplicate proto type registered: purgeplan.ChunkDetails
...
The messages are harmless and we will work to remove them in the future.
Change of some default limits to common values
PR 4415 DylanGuedes: the default value of some limits were changed to protect users from overwhelming their cluster with ingestion load caused by relying on default configs.
We suggest you double check if the following parameters are
present in your Loki config: ingestion_rate_strategy
, max_global_streams_per_user
max_query_length
max_query_parallelism
max_streams_per_user
reject_old_samples
reject_old_samples_max_age
. If they are not present, we recommend you double check that the new values will not negatively impact your system. The changes are:
config | new default | old default |
---|---|---|
ingestion_rate_strategy | “global” | “local” |
max_global_streams_per_user | 5000 | 0 (no limit) |
max_query_length | “721h” | “0h” (no limit) |
max_query_parallelism | 32 | 14 |
max_streams_per_user | 0 (no limit) | 10000 |
reject_old_samples | true | false |
reject_old_samples_max_age | “168h” | “336h” |
per_stream_rate_limit | 3MB | - |
per_stream_rate_limit_burst | 15MB | - |
Change of configuration defaults
config | new default | old default |
---|---|---|
chunk_retain_period | 0s | 30s |
chunk_idle_period | 30m | 1h |
chunk_target_size | 1572864 | 1048576 |
- chunk_retain_period is necessary when using an index queries cache which is not enabled by default. If you have configured an index_queries_cache_config section make sure that you set chunk_retain_period larger than your cache TTL
- chunk_idle_period is how long before a chunk which receives no logs is flushed.
- chunk_target_size was increased to flush slightly larger chunks, if using memcache for a chunks store make sure it will accept files up to 1.5MB in size.
In memory FIFO caches enabled by default
Loki now enables a results cache and chunks cache in memory to improve performance. This can however increase memory usage as the cache’s by default are allowed to consume up to 1GB of memory.
If you would like to disable these caches or change this memory limit:
Disable:
chunk_store_config:
chunk_cache_config:
enable_fifocache: false
query_range:
results_cache:
cache:
enable_fifocache: false
Resize:
chunk_store_config:
chunk_cache_config:
enable_fifocache: true
fifocache:
max_size_bytes: 500MB
query_range:
results_cache:
cache:
enable_fifocache: true
fifocache:
max_size_bytes: 500MB
Ingester Lifecycler final_sleep
now defaults to 0s
- 4608 trevorwhitney: Change default value of ingester lifecycler’s
final_sleep
from30s
to0s
This final sleep exists to keep Loki running for long enough to get one final Prometheus scrape before shutting down, however it also causes Loki to sit idle for 30s on shutdown which is an annoying experience for many people.
We decided the default would be better to disable this sleep behavior but anyone can set this config variable directly to return to the previous behavior.
Ingester WAL now defaults to on, and chunk transfers are disabled by default
- 4543 trevorwhitney: Change more default values and improve application of common storage config
- 4629 owen-d: Default the WAL to enabled in the Loki jsonnet library
- 4624 chaudum: Disable chunk transfers in jsonnet lib
This changes a few default values, resulting in the ingester WAL now being on by default,
and chunk transfer retries are disabled by default. Note, this now means Loki will depend on local disk by default for its WAL (write ahead log) directory. This defaults to wal
but can be overridden via the --ingester.wal-dir
or via path_prefix
in the common configuration section. Below are config snippets with the previous defaults, and another with the new values.
Previous defaults:
ingester:
max_transfer_retries: 10
wal:
enabled: false
New defaults:
ingester:
max_transfer_retries: 0
wal:
enabled: true
Using the write ahead log (WAL) is recommended and is now the default. However using the WAL is incompatible with chunk transfers, if you have explicitly configured ingester.max-transfer-retries
to a non-zero value, you must set it to 0 to disable transfers.
Memberlist config now automatically applies to all non-configured rings
- 4400 trevorwhitney: Config: automatically apply memberlist config too all rings when provided
This change affects the behavior of the ingester, distributor, and ruler rings. Previously, if you wanted to use memberlist for all of these rings, you
had to provide a memberlist
configuration as well as specify store: memberlist
for the kvstore
of each of the rings you wanted to use memberlist.
For example, your configuration might look something like this:
memberlist:
join_members:
- loki.namespace.svc.cluster.local
distributor:
ring:
kvstore:
store: memberlist
ingester:
lifecycler:
ring:
kvstore:
store: memberlist
ruler:
ring:
kvstore:
store: memberlist
Now, if your provide a memberlist
configuration with at least one join_members
, loki will default all rings to use a kvstore
of type memberlist
.
You can change this behavior by overriding specific configurations. For example, if you wanted to use consul
for you ruler
rings, but memberlist
for the ingester
and distributor
, you could do so with the following config (although we don’t know why someone would want to do this):
memberlist:
join_members:
- loki.namespace.svc.cluster.local
ruler:
ring:
kvstore:
store: consul
consul:
host: consul.namespace.svc.cluster.local:8500
Changed defaults for some GRPC server settings
- 4435 trevorwhitney: Change default values for two GRPC settings so querier can connect to frontend/scheduler
This changes two default values, grpc_server_min_time_between_pings
and grpc_server_ping_without_stream_allowed
used by the GRPC server.
Previous Values:
server:
grpc_server_min_time_between_pings: '5m'
grpc_server_ping_without_stream_allowed: false
New Values:
server:
grpc_server_min_time_between_pings: '10s'
grpc_server_ping_without_stream_allowed: true
This issue has some more information on the change.
Some metric prefixes have changed from cortex_
to loki_
- #3842/#4253 jordanrushing: Metrics related to chunk storage and runtime config have changed their prefixes from
cortex_
toloki_
.
cortex_runtime_config* -> loki_runtime_config*
cortex_chunks_store* -> loki_chunks_store*
Recording rules storage is now durable
- 4344 dannykopping: per-tenant WAL
Previously, samples generated by recording rules would only be buffered in memory before being remote-written to Prometheus; from this
version, the ruler
now writes these samples to a per-tenant Write-Ahead Log for durability. More details about the
per-tenant WAL can be found here.
The ruler
now requires persistent storage - see the
Operations page for more details about deployment.
Promtail
The following changes pertain to upgrading Promtail.
Promtail no longer insert promtail_instance
label when scraping gcplog
target
- 4556 james-callahan: Remove
promtail_instance
label that was being added by promtail when scrapinggcplog
target.
2.3.0
Loki
Query restriction introduced for queries which do not have at least one equality matcher
PR 3216 sandeepsukhani: check for stream selectors to have at least one equality matcher
This change now rejects any query which does not contain at least one equality matcher, an example may better illustrate:
{namespace=~".*"}
This query will now be rejected, however there are several ways to modify it for it to succeed:
Add at least one equals label matcher:
{cluster="us-east-1",namespace=~".*"}
Use .+
instead of .*
{namespace=~".+"}
This difference may seem subtle but if we break it down .
matches any character, *
matches zero or more of the preceding character and +
matches one or more of the preceding character. The .*
case will match empty values where .+
will not, this is the important difference. {namespace=""}
is an invalid request (unless you add another equals label matcher like the example above)
The reasoning for this change has to do with how index lookups work in Loki, if you don’t have at least one equality matcher Loki has to perform a complete index table scan which is an expensive and slow operation.
2.2.0
Loki
Be sure to upgrade to 2.0 or 2.1 BEFORE upgrading to 2.2
In Loki 2.2 we changed the internal version of our chunk format from v2 to v3, this is a transparent change and is only relevant if you every try to downgrade a Loki installation. We incorporated the code to read v3 chunks in 2.0.1 and 2.1, as well as 2.2 and any future releases.
If you upgrade to 2.2+ any chunks created can only be read by 2.0.1, 2.1 and 2.2+
This makes it important to first upgrade to 2.0, 2.0.1, or 2.1 before upgrading to 2.2 so that if you need to rollback for any reason you can do so easily.
Note
2.0 and 2.0.1 are identical in every aspect except 2.0.1 contains the code necessary to read the v3 chunk format. Therefor if you are on 2.0 and ugrade to 2.2, if you want to rollback, you must rollback to 2.0.1.
Loki Config
Read this if you use the query-frontend and have sharded_queries_enabled: true
We discovered query scheduling related to sharded queries over long time ranges could lead to unfair work scheduling by one single query in the per tenant work queue.
The max_query_parallelism
setting is designed to limit how many split and sharded units of ‘work’ for a single query are allowed to be put into the per tenant work queue at one time. The previous behavior would split the query by time using the split_queries_by_interval
and compare this value to max_query_parallelism
when filling the queue, however with sharding enabled, every split was then sharded into 16 additional units of work after the max_query_parallelism
limit was applied.
In 2.2 we changed this behavior to apply the max_query_parallelism
after splitting and sharding a query resulting a more fair and expected queue scheduling per query.
What this means Loki will be putting much less work into the work queue per query if you are using the query frontend and have sharding_queries_enabled (which you should). You may need to increase your max_query_parallelism
setting if you are noticing slower query performance In practice, you may not see a difference unless you were running a cluster with a LOT of queriers or queriers with a very high parallelism
frontend_worker setting.
You could consider multiplying your current max_query_parallelism
setting by 16 to obtain the previous behavior, though in practice we suspect few people would really want it this high unless you have a significant querier worker pool.
Also be aware to make sure max_outstanding_per_tenant
is always greater than max_query_parallelism
or large queries will automatically fail with a 429 back to the user.
Promtail
For 2.0 we eliminated the long deprecated entry_parser
configuration in Promtail configs, however in doing so we introduced a very confusing and erroneous default behavior:
If you did not specify a pipeline_stages
entry you would be provided with a default which included the docker
pipeline stage. This can lead to some very confusing results.
In 3404, we corrected this behavior
If you are using docker, and any of your scrape_configs
are missing a pipeline_stages
definition, you should add the following to obtain the correct behaviour:
pipeline_stages:
- docker: {}
2.1.0
The upgrade from 2.0.0 to 2.1.0 should be fairly smooth, be aware of these two things:
Helm charts have moved!
Helm charts are now located at: https://github.com/grafana/helm-charts/
The helm repo URL is now: https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts
Fluent Bit plugin renamed
Fluent bit officially supports Loki as an output plugin now! WoooHOOO!
However this created a naming conflict with our existing output plugin (the new native output uses the name loki
) so we have renamed our plugin.
In time our plan is to deprecate and eliminate our output plugin in favor of the native Loki support. However until then you can continue using the plugin with the following change:
Old:
[Output]
Name loki
New:
[Output]
Name grafana-loki
2.0.0
This is a major Loki release and there are some very important upgrade considerations. For the most part, there are very few impactful changes and for most this will be a seamless upgrade.
2.0.0 Upgrade Topics:
- IMPORTANT If you are using a docker image, read this!
- IMPORTANT boltdb-shipper upgrade considerations
- IMPORTANT results_cachemax_freshness removed from yaml config
- Promtail removed entry_parser config
- If you would like to use the new single store index and v11 schema
IMPORTANT If you are using a docker image, read this!
(This includes, Helm, Tanka, docker-compose etc.)
The default config file in the docker image, as well as the default helm values.yaml and jsonnet for Tanka all specify a schema definition to make things easier to get started.
If you have not specified your own config file with your own schema definition (or you do not have a custom schema definition in your values.yaml), upgrading to 2.0 will break things!
In 2.0 the defaults are now v11 schema and the boltdb-shipper
index type.
If you are using an index type of aws
, bigtable
, or cassandra
this means you have already defined a custom schema and there is nothing further you need to do regarding the schema.
You can consider however adding a new schema entry to use the new boltdb-shipper
type if you want to move away from these separate index stores and instead use just one object store.
What to do
The minimum action required is to create a config which specifies the schema to match what the previous defaults were.
(Keep in mind this will only tell Loki to use the old schema default, if you would like to upgrade to v11 and/or move to the single store boltdb-shipper, see below)
There are three places we have hard coded the schema definition:
Helm
Helm has shipped with the same internal schema in the values.yaml file for a very long time.
If you are providing your own values.yaml file then there is no required action because you already have a schema definition.
If you are not providing your own values.yaml file, you will need to make one!
We suggest using the included values.yaml file from the 1.6.0 tag
This matches what the default values.yaml file had prior to 2.0 and is necessary for Loki to work post 2.0
As mentioned above, you should also consider looking at moving to the v11 schema and boltdb-shipper see below for more information.
Tanka
This likely only affects a small portion of tanka users because the default schema config for Loki was forcing GCS
and bigtable
.
If your main.jsonnet
(or somewhere in your manually created jsonnet) does not have a schema config section then you will need to add one like this!
{
_config+:: {
using_boltdb_shipper: false,
loki+: {
schema_config+: {
configs: [{
from: '2018-04-15',
store: 'bigtable',
object_store: 'gcs',
schema: 'v11',
index: {
prefix: '%s_index_' % $._config.table_prefix,
period: '168h',
},
}],
},
},
}
}
Note
If you had setindex_period_hours
to a value other than 168h (the previous default) you must update this in the above configperiod:
to match what you chose.
Note
We have changed the default index store toboltdb-shipper
it’s important to addusing_boltdb_shipper: false,
until you are ready to change (if you want to change)
Changing the jsonnet config to use the boltdb-shipper
type is the same as below where you need to add a new schema section.
HOWEVER Be aware when you change using_boltdb_shipper: true
the deployment type for the ingesters and queriers will change to statefulsets! Statefulsets are required for the ingester and querier using boltdb-shipper.
Docker (e.g. docker-compose)
For docker related cases you will have to mount a Loki config file separate from what’s shipped inside the container
I would recommend taking the previous default file from the 1.6.0 tag on github
How you get this mounted and in use by Loki might vary based on how you are using the image, but this is a common example:
docker run -d --name=loki --mount type=bind,source="path to loki-config.yaml",target=/etc/loki/local-config.yaml
The Loki docker image is expecting to find the config file at /etc/loki/local-config.yaml
IMPORTANT: boltdb-shipper upgrade considerations.
Significant changes have taken place between 1.6.0 and 2.0.0 for boltdb-shipper index type, if you are already running this index and are upgrading some extra caution is warranted.
Take a complete backup of the index
directory in your object store, this location might be slightly different depending on what store you use.
It should be a folder named index with a bunch of folders inside with names like index_18561
,index_18560
…
The chunks directory should not need any special backups.
If you have an environment to test this in, do so before upgrading against critical data.
There are 2 significant changes warranting the backup of this data because they will make rolling back impossible:
- A compactor is included which will take existing index files and compact them to one per day and remove non compacted files
- All index files are now gzipped before uploading
The second part is important because 1.6.0 does not understand how to read the gzipped files, so any new files uploaded or any files compacted become unreadable to 1.6.0 or earlier.
THIS BEING SAID we are not expecting problems, our testing so far has not uncovered any problems, but some extra precaution might save data loss in unforeseen circumstances!
Report any problems via GitHub issues or reach us on the #loki slack channel.
Note
If are using boltdb-shipper and were running with high availability and separate filesystems, this was a poorly documented and even more experimental mode we toyed with using boltdb-shipper. For now we removed the documentation and also any kind of support for this mode.
To use boltdb-shipper in 2.0 you need a shared storage (S3, GCS, etc), the mode of running with separate filesystem stores in HA using a ring is not officially supported.
We didn’t do anything explicitly to limit this functionality however we have not had any time to actually test this which is why we removed the docs and are listing it as not supported.
If running in microservices, deploy ingesters before queriers
Ingesters now expose a new RPC method that queriers use when the index type is boltdb-shipper
.
Queriers generally roll out faster than ingesters, so if new queriers query older ingesters using the new RPC, the queries would fail.
To avoid any query downtime during the upgrade, rollout ingesters before queriers.
If running the compactor, ensure it has delete permissions for the object storage.
The compactor is an optional but suggested component that combines and deduplicates the boltdb-shipper index files. When compacting index files, the compactor writes a new file and deletes unoptimized files. Ensure that the compactor has appropriate permissions for deleting files, for example, s3:DeleteObject permission for AWS S3.
IMPORTANT: results_cache.max_freshness
removed from YAML config
The max_freshness
config from results_cache
has been removed in favour of another flag called max_cache_freshness_per_query
in limits_config
which has the same effect.
If you happen to have results_cache.max_freshness
set, use limits_config.max_cache_freshness_per_query
YAML config instead.
Promtail config removed
The long deprecated entry_parser
config in Promtail has been removed, use pipeline_stages instead.
Upgrading schema to use boltdb-shipper and/or v11 schema
If you would also like to take advantage of the new Single Store (boltdb-shipper) index, as well as the v11 schema if you aren’t already using it.
You can do this by adding a new schema entry.
Here is an example:
schema_config:
configs:
- from: 2018-04-15 ①
store: boltdb ①④
object_store: filesystem ①④
schema: v11 ②
index:
prefix: index_ ①
period: 168h ①
- from: 2020-10-24 ③
store: boltdb-shipper
object_store: filesystem ④
schema: v11
index:
prefix: index_
period: 24h ⑤
① Make sure all of these match your current schema config ② Make sure this matches your previous schema version, Helm for example is likely v9 ③ Make sure this is a date in the FUTURE keep in mind Loki only knows UTC so make sure it’s a future UTC date ④ Make sure this matches your existing config (e.g. maybe you were using gcs for your object_store) ⑤ 24h is required for boltdb-shipper
There are more examples on the Storage description page including the information you need to setup the storage
section for boltdb-shipper.
1.6.0
Important: Ksonnet port changed and removed NET_BIND_SERVICE capability from Docker image
In 1.5.0 we changed the Loki user to not run as root which created problems binding to port 80. To address this we updated the docker image to add the NET_BIND_SERVICE capability to the loki process which allowed Loki to bind to port 80 as a non root user, so long as the underlying system allowed that linux capability.
This has proved to be a problem for many reasons and in PR 2294 the capability was removed.
It is now no longer possible for the Loki to be started with a port less than 1024 with the published docker image.
The default for Helm has always been port 3100, and Helm users should be unaffect unless they changed the default.
Ksonnet users however should closely check their configuration, in PR 2294 the loki port was changed from 80 to 3100
IMPORTANT: If you run Loki in microservices mode, special rollout instructions
A new ingester GRPC API has been added allowing to speed up metric queries, to ensure a rollout without query errors make sure you upgrade all ingesters first. Once this is done you can then proceed with the rest of the deployment, this is to ensure that queriers won’t look for an API not yet available.
If you roll out everything at once, queriers with this new code will attempt to query ingesters which may not have the new method on the API and queries will fail.
This will only affect reads(queries) and not writes and only for the duration of the rollout.
IMPORTANT: Scrape config changes to both Helm and Ksonnet will affect labels created by Promtail
PR 2091 Makes several changes to the Promtail scrape config:
This is triggered by https://github.com/grafana/jsonnet-libs/pull/261
The above PR changes the instance label to be actually unique within
a scrape config. It also adds a pod and a container target label
so that metrics can easily be joined with metrics from cAdvisor, KSM,
and the Kubelet.
This commit adds the same to the Loki scrape config. It also removes
the container_name label. It is the same as the container label
and was already added to Loki previously. However, the
container_name label is deprecated and has disappeared in Kubernetes 1.16,
so that it will soon become useless for direct joining.
TL;DR
The following label have been changed in both the Helm and Ksonnet Promtail scrape configs:
instance
-> pod
container_name
-> container
Experimental boltdb-shipper changes
PR 2166 now forces the index to have a period of exactly 24h
:
Loki will fail to start with an error if the active schema or upcoming schema are not set to a period of 24h
You can add a new schema config like this:
schema_config:
configs:
- from: 2020-01-01 <----- This is your current entry, date will be different
store: boltdb-shipper
object_store: aws
schema: v11
index:
prefix: index_
period: 168h
- from: [INSERT FUTURE DATE HERE] <----- Add another entry, set a future date
store: boltdb-shipper
object_store: aws
schema: v11
index:
prefix: index_
period: 24h <--- This must be 24h
If you are not on schema: v11
this would be a good opportunity to make that change in the new schema config also.
Note
If the current time in your timezone is after midnight UTC already, set the date one additional day forward.
There was also a significant overhaul to how boltdb-shipper internals, this should not be visible to a user but as this feature is experimental and under development bug are possible!
The most noticeable change if you look in the storage, Loki no longer updates an existing file and instead creates a new index file every 15mins, this is an important move to make sure objects in the object store are immutable and will simplify future operations like compaction and deletion.
Breaking CLI flags changes
The following CLI flags where changed to improve consistency, they are not expected to be widely used
- querier.query_timeout
+ querier.query-timeout
- distributor.extra-query-delay
+ querier.extra-query-delay
- max-chunk-batch-size
+ store.max-chunk-batch-size
- ingester.concurrent-flushed
+ ingester.concurrent-flushes
Loki Canary metric name changes
When adding some new features to the canary we realized the existing metrics were not compliant with standards for counter names, the following metrics have been renamed:
loki_canary_total_entries -> loki_canary_entries_total
loki_canary_out_of_order_entries -> loki_canary_out_of_order_entries_total
loki_canary_websocket_missing_entries -> loki_canary_websocket_missing_entries_total
loki_canary_missing_entries -> loki_canary_missing_entries_total
loki_canary_unexpected_entries -> loki_canary_unexpected_entries_total
loki_canary_duplicate_entries -> loki_canary_duplicate_entries_total
loki_canary_ws_reconnects -> loki_canary_ws_reconnects_total
loki_canary_response_latency -> loki_canary_response_latency_seconds
Ksonnet Changes
In production/ksonnet/loki/config.libsonnet
the variable storage_backend
used to have a default value of 'bigtable,gcs'
.
This has been changed to providing no default and will error if not supplied in your environment jsonnet,
here is an example of what you should add to have the same behavior as the default (namespace and cluster should already be defined):
_config+:: {
namespace: 'loki-dev',
cluster: 'us-central1',
storage_backend: 'gcs,bigtable',
Defaulting to gcs,bigtable
was confusing for anyone using ksonnet with other storage backends as it would manifest itself with obscure bigtable errors.
1.5.0
Note
The required upgrade path outlined for version 1.4.0 below is still true for moving to 1.5.0 from any release older than 1.4.0 (e.g. 1.3.0 -> 1.5.0 needs to also look at the 1.4.0 upgrade requirements).
Breaking config changes!
Loki 1.5.0 vendors Cortex v1.0.0 (congratulations!), which has a massive list of changes.
While changes in the command line flags affect Loki as well, we usually recommend people to use configuration file instead.
Cortex has done lot of cleanup in the configuration files, and you are strongly urged to take a look at the annotated diff for config file before upgrading to Loki 1.5.0.
Following fields were removed from YAML configuration completely: claim_on_rollout
(always true), normalise_tokens
(always true).
Test Your Config
To see if your config needs to change, one way to quickly test is to download a 1.5.0 (or newer) binary from the release page
Then run the binary providing your config file ./loki-linux-amd64 -config.file=myconfig.yaml
If there are configs which are no longer valid you will see errors immediately:
./loki-linux-amd64 -config.file=loki-local-config.yaml
failed parsing config: loki-local-config.yaml: yaml: unmarshal errors:
line 35: field dynamodbconfig not found in type aws.StorageConfig
Referencing the list of diffs I can see this config changed:
- dynamodbconfig:
+ dynamodb:
Also several other AWS related configs changed and would need to udpate those as well.
Loki Docker Image User and File Location Changes
To improve security concerns, in 1.5.0 the Docker container no longer runs the loki process as root
and instead the process runs as user loki
with UID 10001
and GID 10001
This may affect people in a couple ways:
Loki Port
If you are running Loki with a config that opens a port number above 1024 (which is the default, 3100 for HTTP and 9095 for GRPC) everything should work fine in regards to ports.
If you are running Loki with a config that opens a port number less than 1024 Linux normally requires root permissions to do this, HOWEVER in the Docker container we run setcap cap_net_bind_service=+ep /usr/bin/loki
This capability lets the loki process bind to a port less than 1024 when run as a non root user.
Not every environment will allow this capability however, it’s possible to restrict this capability in linux. If this restriction is in place, you will be forced to run Loki with a config that has HTTP and GRPC ports above 1024.
Filesystem
Note
The location Loki is looking for files with the provided config in the docker image has changed.
In 1.4.0 and earlier the included config file in the docker container was using directories:
/tmp/loki/index
/tmp/loki/chunks
In 1.5.0 this has changed:
/loki/index
/loki/chunks
This will mostly affect anyone using docker-compose or docker to run Loki and are specifying a volume to persist storage.
There are two concerns to track here, one is the correct ownership of the files and the other is making sure your mounts updated to the new location.
One possible upgrade path would look like this:
If I were running Loki with this command docker run -d --name=loki --mount source=loki-data,target=/tmp/loki -p 3100:3100 grafana/loki:1.4.0
This would mount a docker volume named loki-data
to the /tmp/loki
folder which is where Loki will persist the index
and chunks
folder in 1.4.0
To move to 1.5.0 I can do the following (note that your container names and paths and volumes etc may be different):
docker stop loki
docker rm loki
docker run --rm --name="loki-perm" -it --mount source=loki-data,target=/mnt ubuntu /bin/bash
cd /mnt
chown -R 10001:10001 ./*
exit
docker run -d --name=loki --mount source=loki-data,target=/loki -p 3100:3100 grafana/loki:1.5.0
Notice the change in the target=/loki
for 1.5.0 to the new data directory location specified in the included Loki config file.
The intermediate step of using an ubuntu image to change the ownership of the Loki files to the new user might not be necessary if you can easily access these files to run the chown
command directly.
That is if you have access to /var/lib/docker/volumes
or if you mounted to a different local filesystem directory, you can change the ownership directly without using a container.
Loki Duration Configs
If you get an error like:
./loki-linux-amd64-1.5.0 -log.level=debug -config.file=/etc/loki/config.yml
failed parsing config: /etc/loki/config.yml: not a valid duration string: "0"
This is because of some underlying changes that no longer allow durations without a unit.
Unfortunately the yaml parser doesn’t give a line number but it’s likely to be one of these two:
chunk_store_config:
max_look_back_period: 0s # DURATION VALUES MUST HAVE A UNIT EVEN IF THEY ARE ZERO
table_manager:
retention_deletes_enabled: false
retention_period: 0s # DURATION VALUES MUST HAVE A UNIT EVEN IF THEY ARE ZERO
Promtail Config Changes
The underlying backoff library used in Promtail had a config change which wasn’t originally noted in the release notes:
If you get this error:
Unable to parse config: /etc/promtail/promtail.yaml: yaml: unmarshal errors:
line 3: field maxbackoff not found in type util.BackoffConfig
line 4: field maxretries not found in type util.BackoffConfig
line 5: field minbackoff not found in type util.BackoffConfig
The new values are:
min_period:
max_period:
max_retries:
1.4.0
Loki 1.4.0 vendors Cortex v0.7.0-rc.0 which contains several breaking config changes.
In the cache_config, defaul_validity
has changed to default_validity
.
If you configured your schema via arguments and not a config file, this is no longer supported. This is not something we had ever provided as an option via docs and is unlikely anyone is doing, but worth mentioning.
The other config changes should not be relevant to Loki.
Required Upgrade Path
The newly vendored version of Cortex removes code related to de-normalized tokens in the ring. What you need to know is this:
A “shared ring” as mentioned below refers to using consul or etcd for values in the following config:
kvstore:
# The backend storage to use for the ring. Supported values are
# consul, etcd, inmemory
store: <string>
- Running without using a shared ring (inmemory): No action required
- Running with a shared ring and upgrading from v1.3.0 -> v1.4.0: No action required
- Running with a shared ring and upgrading from any version less than v1.3.0 (e.g. v1.2.0) -> v1.4.0: ACTION REQUIRED
There are two options for upgrade if you are not on version 1.3.0 and are using a shared ring:
- Upgrade first to v1.3.0 BEFORE upgrading to v1.4.0
OR
- If you are running a single binary you only need to add this flag to your single binary command.
- Add the following configuration to your ingesters command:
-ingester.normalise-tokens=true
- Restart your ingesters with this config
- Proceed with upgrading to v1.4.0
- Remove the config option (only do this after everything is running v1.4.0)
It is also possible to enable this flag via config file, see the lifecycler_config
configuration option.
If using the Helm Loki chart:
extraArgs:
ingester.normalise-tokens: true
If using the Helm Loki-Stack chart:
loki:
extraArgs:
ingester.normalise-tokens: true
What will go wrong
If you attempt to add a v1.4.0 ingester to a ring created by Loki v1.2.0 or older which does not have the commandline argument -ingester.normalise-tokens=true
(or configured via config file), the v1.4.0 ingester will remove all the entries in the ring for all the other ingesters as it cannot “see” them.
This will result in distributors failing to write and a general ingestion failure for the system.
If this happens to you, you will want to rollback your deployment immediately. You need to remove the v1.4.0 ingester from the ring ASAP, this should allow the existing ingesters to re-insert their tokens. You will also want to remove any v1.4.0 distributors as they will not understand the old ring either and will fail to send traffic.