In this article I will demonstrate how to prepare and configure Loki and how to use LogForwarder to forward OpenShift logs to this service.

In this article, we will use a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (rhel8) server to run our Loki stack, which will be composed of Loki, Grafana and PromTail, we will use podman and podman-compose to manage our stack.

Lets go to what matters.

Loki Server

First, let's start our Loki, for that we will use a rhel8 server

Let's create the following directory structure

[root@loki-server ~]# mkdir -pv monitoring/{loki,promtail,grafana}/{data,config}

mkdir

We will also leave our provisioning directory created for later use.

[root@loki-server ~]# mkdir -pv /root/monitoring/grafana/data/provisioning/datasources

Now let's create our docker-compose.yaml.

version: "3"
services:
  loki:
    image: grafana/loki:2.5.0
    volumes:
      - /root/monitoring/loki/config:/mnt/config
    ports:
      - "3100:3100"
    command: -config.file=/mnt/config/loki-config.yaml
    user: loki
    networks:
      - loki

  promtail:
    privileged: true      
    image: grafana/promtail:2.5.0
    volumes:
      - /root/monitoring/promtail/config:/mnt/config
      - /var/log:/var/log
    command: -config.file=/mnt/config/promtail-config.yaml
    ports:
      - "9080:9080"
    user: root
    networks:
      - loki

  grafana:
    image: grafana/grafana:latest
    volumes:
      - grafana-storage:/var/lib/grafana
      - /root/monitoring/grafana/data/provisioning:/etc/grafana/provisioning
    environment:
      - GF_INSTALL_PLUGIN='grafana-simple-json-datasource'
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    networks:
      - loki

networks:
  loki:

volumes:
  grafana-storage:

Now let's create our configuration files, starting with promtail-config.yaml.
- Promtail is an agent which ships the contents of local logs to a private Grafana Loki instance. It is usually deployed to every machine that has applications needed to be monitored.

[root@loki-server ~]# cat /root/monitoring/promtail/config/promtail-config.yaml

server:
  http_listen_port: 9080
  grpc_listen_port: 0

positions:
  filename: /tmp/positions.yaml

clients:
  - url: http://loki-server:3100/loki/api/v1/push

scrape_configs:
- job_name: system
  static_configs:
  - targets:
      - localhost
    labels:
      job: varlogs
      __path__: /var/log/**

Adjust the url according to your scenario, inform the host server followed by the api context for communication.

Obs.: In this scenario, promtail is just forwarding logs from the /var/log directory to Loki, which is not a necessary component for receiving logs from Openshift.

Now let's create our loki-config.yaml file

[root@loki-server ~]# cat /root/monitoring/loki/config/loki-config.yaml

auth_enabled: false

server:
  http_listen_port: 3100
  grpc_listen_port: 9096
  grpc_server_max_recv_msg_size: 8388608

common:
  path_prefix: /tmp/loki
  storage:
    filesystem:
      chunks_directory: /tmp/loki/chunks
      rules_directory: /tmp/loki/rules
  replication_factor: 1
  ring:
    instance_addr: 127.0.0.1
    kvstore:
      store: inmemory

schema_config:
  configs:
    - from: 2020-10-24
      store: boltdb-shipper
      object_store: filesystem
      schema: v11
      index:
        prefix: index_
        period: 24h

ingester:
  wal:
    enabled: true
    dir: /tmp/wal
  lifecycler:
    address: 127.0.0.1
    ring:
      kvstore:
        store: inmemory
      replication_factor: 1
    final_sleep: 0s
  chunk_idle_period: 1h       # Any chunk not receiving new logs in this time will be flushed
  chunk_target_size: 8388608
  max_chunk_age: 1h           # All chunks will be flushed when they hit this age, default is 1h
  chunk_retain_period: 30s    # Must be greater than index read cache TTL if using an index cache (Default index read cache TTL is 5m)
  max_transfer_retries: 0     # Chunk transfers disabled

storage_config:
  boltdb_shipper:
    active_index_directory: /tmp/loki/boltdb-shipper-active
    cache_location: /tmp/loki/boltdb-shipper-cache
    cache_ttl: 24h         
    shared_store: filesystem
  filesystem:
    directory: /tmp/loki/chunks

compactor:
  working_directory: /tmp/loki/boltdb-shipper-compactor
  shared_store: filesystem

limits_config:
  reject_old_samples: true
  reject_old_samples_max_age: 12h
  ingestion_rate_mb: 8
  ingestion_burst_size_mb: 16

chunk_store_config:
  max_look_back_period: 0s

table_manager:
  retention_deletes_enabled: false
  retention_period: 0s

ruler:
  storage:
    type: local
    local:
      directory: /tmp/loki/rules
  rule_path: /tmp/loki/rules-temp
  ring:
    kvstore:
      store: inmemory
  enable_api: true

This configuration can be found in the documentation, in the troubleshooting item, demonstrating the recommendations and best practices, link in the document references.

Now let's start our stack and validate that everything is working correctly
- Run the command below to start the services
```
[root@loki-server ~]# podman-compose --project-name monitoring up -d
```
- To validate that the containers were uploaded correctly, run the following command
```
[root@loki-server ~]# podman ps
```

podman-ps

If your result is the same, let's validate if grafana is accessible

grafana-login

Obs.: To access grafana use the username and password as admin

Now we need to add our datasource pointing to the Loki endpoint and then use the Grafana interface to view our logs.

grafana-datasource-null

So that we have our datasource being automatically configured as soon as we install our instance, we are going to use the Grafana PROVISIONING feature, for that, create the following file:

[root@loki-server ~]# cat /root/monitoring/grafana/data/provisioning/datasources/loki.yaml

apiVersion: 1
datasources:
 - name: Loki
   type: loki
   access: proxy
   orgId: 1
   url: http://loki-server:3100
   isDefault: true
   version: 1
   editable: true

This resource will configure a datasource of type loki, already pointing to the url of the loki server running on port 3100 of my host.

After that, run the following command to restart and apply our configuration to datasource

[root@loki-server ~]# podman pod restart monitoring

podman-pod-restart

Now we can go back to the Grafana interface and validate that our datasource was created successfully

grafana-datasource-loki

To test our Loki using promtail with local logs, let's create the Explore icon in the side menu, now let's run the following query to validate

{filename="/var/log/messages"}

loki-messages

Now that we know that our Loki is working properly, let's move on to OpenShift.

OpenShift LogForwarder

Obs.: This article does not include the installation of OpenShift Logging, for more information, see the reference link.

Now in the OpenShift interface
- In the side menu, select Installed Operators > Select the openshift-logging project > Then click on "Cluster Log Forwarder" in Provided API's.

cluster-log-forwarder

Now click on "Create ClusterLogForwarder"

create-log-forwarder

In this yaml, we register our loki-server as remoteloki and in the pipeline, we are informing that we want the application, infrastructure and audit logs to be forwarded to remoteloki and to the default, which in this case is the internal elasticsearch of Openhift Logging.

apiVersion: logging.openshift.io/v1
kind: ClusterLogForwarder
metadata:
  name: instance
  namespace: openshift-logging
spec:
  outputs:
    - name: remoteloki
      type: loki
      url: 'http://loki-server:3100'
  pipelines:
    - inputRefs:
        - application
        - infrastructure
        - audit
      outputRefs:
        - remoteloki
        - default

loki-yaml

After clicking Create, wait until the status is "Condition: Ready", as shown in the image below

instance-condition-ready

After this process, the new configuration needs to be applied to the collector(fluentd) pods, wait until all have been restarted and have the new configuration

[root@bastion ~]# oc get pods -l component=collector -n openshift-logging

collector-pods

Now back in Grafana, we can run the query below to validate that our logs are being successfully received from OpenShift

{log_type="application"}

loki-application

For more query and filter options, click the "Log browser" button, then select the items you want to query and then "Show logs"

loki-log-browser

Example:

{kubernetes_container_name="argocd-application-controller",kubernetes_host="wkshop-gsm2g-infra-fzzp9",kubernetes_namespace_name="openshift-gitops"}

Blog

How to Forward OpenShift Logs to an External Instance of Loki

Loki Server

OpenShift LogForwarder

Example:

References:

Keep reading

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Multicluster Engine and Assisted Installer Integration: Deploy and Expand Clusters Easily

How to create a Hybrid MLOps platform using Red Hat OpenShift and Google Cloud

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