The " How to send logs to Loki" page at https://documentation.ubuntu.com/lxd/en/stable-5.21/howto/logs_loki/ simply instructs to “Install Loki” which is a link that points to: https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/setup/install/
That grafana page has the following section:
General process
In order to run Loki, you must:
- Download and install both Loki and Promtail.
- Download config files for both programs.
- Start Loki.
- Update the Promtail config file to get your logs into Loki.
- Start Promtail.
And that seems to coincide with the “Install and run locally” page at https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/setup/install/local/ which instructs:
apt-get install loki promtail
However, the LXD " How to send logs to Loki" page has:
lxc config set loki.api.url=http://<loki_server_IP>:3100
That seems to imply that the LXD server sends log data directly into Loki.
Which, if I’m understanding things correctly, that would (or might) mean that Promtail is not needed, since Promtail seems to be for sending logs to Loki… which the LXD server already does via that loki.api setting above.
So my question: Is Promtail needed for the LXD Grafana dashboard Loki logs part and does Promtail even need to be installed?
I’m having some other issues with getting my Loki logs displayed (posted a separate support thread on that) and this is one part of the install process that I was looking into to figure things out. It probably is not causing my other Loki logs issue. It just appears to me as though maybe Promtail isn’t even doing anything for this LXD metrics setup, so the Grafana instruction that “you must” (install Promtail along with the other stuff) may not be correct.