Scaling with Grafana Loki
See Loki: Prometheus-inspired, open source logging for cloud natives for a discussion about Grafana Loki’s scalability.
When scaling Loki, operators should consider running several Loki processes
partitioned by role (ingester, distributor, querier) rather than a single Loki
process. Grafana Labs' production setup
contains .libsonnet
files that demonstrates configuring separate components
and scaling for resource usage.
Separate Query Scheduler
The Query frontend has an in-memory queue that can be moved out into a separate process similar to the Cortex Query Scheduler. This allows running multiple query frontends.
In order to run with the Query Scheduler, the frontend needs to be passed the scheduler’s address via -frontend.scheduler-address
and the querier processes needs to be started with -querier.scheduler-address
set to the same address. Both options can also be defined via the configuration file.
It is not valid to start the querier with both a configured frontend and a scheduler address.
The query scheduler process itself can be started via the -target=query-scheduler
option of the Loki Docker image. For instance, docker run grafana/loki:latest -config.file=/cortex/config/cortex.yaml -target=query-scheduler -server.http-listen-port=8009 -server.grpc-listen-port=9009
starts the query scheduler listening on ports 8009
and 9009
.
Memory ballast
In compute-constrained environments, garbage collection can become a significant performance factor. Frequently-run garbage collection interferes with running the application by using CPU resources. The use of memory ballast can mitigate the issue. Memory ballast allocates extra, but unused virtual memory in order to inflate the quantity of live heap space. Garbage collection is triggered by the growth of heap space usage. The inflated quantity of heap space reduces the perceived growth, so garbage collection occurs less frequently.
Configure memory ballast using the ballast_bytes configuration option.
Related Loki resources
Getting started with logging and Grafana Loki (APAC timezone)
Join this webinar to learn why correlating metrics and logs is critical across the development lifecycle, and how Loki helps reduce logging costs and operations overhead.
Logging with Loki: Essential configuration settings
This webinar focuses on Grafana Loki configuration including agents Promtail and Docker; the Loki server; and Loki storage for popular backends.
Observability with logs & Grafana
Discover how you can utilize, manage, and visualize log events with Grafana and Grafana’s logging application Loki.