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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.

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Upgrading

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=2.3.0
export NEW_LOKI=2.4.1
export CONFIG_FILE=loki-local-config.yaml
diff --color=always --side-by-side <(docker run --rm -t -v "${PWD}":/config grafana/loki:${OLD_LOKI} -config.file=/config/${CONFIG_FILE} -print-config-stderr 2>&1 | sed '/Starting Loki/q' | tr -d '\r') <(docker run --rm -t -v "${PWD}":/config grafana/loki:${NEW_LOKI} -config.file=/config/${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

2.8.0

Loki

Default retention_period has changed

This change will affect you if you have:

yaml 
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.

yaml 
limits_config:
  retention_period: 744h

Please note: In previous versions, the zero value of 0 or 0s 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 Loki’s 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:

shell 
go build ./clients/cmd/promtail --tags=promtail_journal_enabled

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:

yaml 
ruler:
  wal_cleaner:
    period: 5s

Querier

query-frontend k8s 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 k8s 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 k8s 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 the query-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 setting auth_enabled: false
  • storage is now using Minio instead of local filesystem
    • move your current storage into .data/minio and it should work transparently
  • 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, or filter-and-delete. By default, filter-and-delete is enabled.
  • Any allow_delete per-tenant overrides need to be removed or changed to deletion_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

yaml 
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:

yaml 
 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 the query_range config now defaults to true.
  • split_queries_by_interval under the limits_config config now defaults to 30m, it was 0s.
  • max_chunk_age in the ingester config now defaults to 2h previously it was 1h.
  • query_ingesters_within under the querier config now defaults to 3h, previously it was 0s. Any query (or subquery) that has an end time more than 3h 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 to 0s to always query ingesters.
  • max_concurrent under the querier config now defaults to 10 instead of 20.
  • match_max_concurrent under the frontend_worker config now defaults to true, this supersedes the parallelism setting which can now be removed from your config. Controlling query parallelism of a single process can now be done with the querier max_concurrent setting.
  • flush_op_timeout under the ingester configuration block now defaults to 10m, increased from 10s. This can help when replaying a large WAL on Loki startup, and avoid msg="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:

yaml 
# 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, 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:

  1. Running a single binary Loki with any index type other than boltdb-shipper or boltdb
  2. Relying on retention with the configs retention_deletes_enabled and retention_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:

confignew defaultold default
ingestion_rate_strategy“global”“local”
max_global_streams_per_user50000 (no limit)
max_query_length“721h”“0h” (no limit)
max_query_parallelism3214
max_streams_per_user0 (no limit)10000
reject_old_samplestruefalse
reject_old_samples_max_age“168h”“336h”
per_stream_rate_limit3MB-
per_stream_rate_limit_burst15MB-

Change of configuration defaults

confignew defaultold default
chunk_retain_period0s30s
chunk_idle_period30m1h
chunk_target_size15728641048576
  • 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 from 30s to 0s

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 it’s 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:

yaml 
ingester:
  max_transfer_retries: 10
  wal:
    enabled: false

New defaults:

yaml 
ingester:
  max_transfer_retries: 0
  wal:
    enabled: true

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:

yaml 
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):

yaml 
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_ to loki_.
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 - please 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 scraping gcplog 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:

yaml 
pipeline_stages:
  - docker: {}

2.1.0

The upgrade from 2.0.0 to 2.1.0 should be fairly smooth, please 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!

(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!

jsonnet 
{
  _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 set index_period_hours to a value other than 168h (the previous default) you must update this in the above config period: to match what you chose.

NOTE We have changed the default index store to boltdb-shipper it’s important to add using_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:

shell 
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.

Please strongly consider taking 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 please 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!

Please 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 please 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:

yaml 
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 K8s 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:

yaml 
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

diff 
- 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:

nohighlight 
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):

jsonnet 
_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:

shell 
./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:

diff 
-  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

Please 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 (please 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:

nohighlight 
 ./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:

yaml 
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:

nohighlight 
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:

yaml 
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:

Note: A “shared ring” as mentioned below refers to using consul or etcd for values in the following config:

yaml 
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

Note: If you are running a single binary you only need to add this flag to your single binary command.

  1. Add the following configuration to your ingesters command: -ingester.normalise-tokens=true
  2. Restart your ingesters with this config
  3. Proceed with upgrading to v1.4.0
  4. Remove the config option (only do this after everything is running v1.4.0)

Note: It’s also possible to enable this flag via config file, see the lifecycler_config configuration option.

If using the Helm Loki chart:

yaml 
extraArgs:
  ingester.normalise-tokens: true

If using the Helm Loki-Stack chart:

yaml 
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.