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Troubleshooting Grafana Loki

“Loki: Bad Gateway. 502”

This error can appear in Grafana when Grafana Loki is added as a datasource, indicating that Grafana in unable to connect to Loki. There may one of many root causes:

  • If Loki is deployed with Docker, and Grafana and Loki are not running in the same node, check your firewall to make sure the nodes can connect.
  • If Loki is deployed with Kubernetes:
    • If Grafana and Loki are in the same namespace, set the Loki URL as http://$LOKI_SERVICE_NAME:$LOKI_PORT
    • Otherwise, set the Loki URL as http://$LOKI_SERVICE_NAME.$LOKI_NAMESPACE:$LOKI_PORT

“Data source connected, but no labels received. Verify that Loki and Promtail is configured properly.”

This error can appear in Grafana when Loki is added as a datasource, indicating that although Grafana has connected to Loki, Loki hasn’t received any logs from Promtail yet. There may be one of many root causes:

  • Promtail is running and collecting logs but is unable to connect to Loki to send the logs. Check Promtail’s output.
  • Promtail started sending logs to Loki before Loki was ready. This can happen in test environment where Promtail has already read all logs and sent them off. Here is what you can do:
    • Start Promtail after Loki, e.g., 60 seconds later.
    • To force Promtail to re-send log messages, delete the positions file (default location /tmp/positions.yaml).
  • Promtail is ignoring targets and isn’t reading any logs because of a configuration issue.
    • This can be detected by turning on debug logging in Promtail and looking for dropping target, no labels or ignoring target messages.
  • Promtail cannot find the location of your log files. Check that the scrape_configs contains valid path settings for finding the logs on your worker nodes.
  • Your pods are running with different labels than the ones Promtail is configured to read. Check scrape_configs to validate.

Troubleshooting targets

Promtail exposes two web pages that can be used to understand how its service discovery works.

The service discovery page (/service-discovery) shows all discovered targets with their labels before and after relabeling as well as the reason why the target has been dropped.

The targets page (/targets) displays only targets that are being actively scraped and their respective labels, files, and positions.

On Kubernetes, you can access those two pages by port-forwarding the Promtail port (9080 or 3101 if using Helm) locally:

Bash 
$ kubectl port-forward loki-promtail-jrfg7 9080
# Then, in a web browser, visit http://localhost:9080/service-discovery

Debug output

Both Loki and Promtail support a log level flag with the addition of a command-line option:

Bash 
loki -log.level=debug
Bash 
promtail -log.level=debug

Failed to create target, ioutil.ReadDir: readdirent: not a directory

The Promtail configuration contains a __path__ entry to a directory that Promtail cannot find.

Connecting to a Promtail pod to troubleshoot

First check Troubleshooting targets section above. If that doesn’t help answer your questions, you can connect to the Promtail pod to investigate further.

If you are running Promtail as a DaemonSet in your cluster, you will have a Promtail pod on each node, so figure out which Promtail you need to debug first:

shell 
$ kubectl get pods --all-namespaces -o wide
NAME                                   READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE   IP             NODE        NOMINATED NODE
...
nginx-7b6fb56fb8-cw2cm                 1/1     Running   0          41d   10.56.4.12     node-ckgc   <none>
...
promtail-bth9q                         1/1     Running   0          3h    10.56.4.217    node-ckgc   <none>

That output is truncated to highlight just the two pods we are interested in, you can see with the -o wide flag the NODE on which they are running.

You’ll want to match the node for the pod you are interested in, in this example NGINX, to the Promtail running on the same node.

To debug you can connect to the Promtail pod:

shell 
kubectl exec -it promtail-bth9q -- /bin/sh

Once connected, verify the config in /etc/promtail/promtail.yml has the contents you expect.

Also check /var/log/positions.yaml (/run/promtail/positions.yaml when deployed by Helm or whatever value is specified for positions.file) and make sure Promtail is tailing the logs you would expect.

You can check the Promtail log by looking in /var/log/containers at the Promtail container log.

Enable tracing for Loki

Loki can be traced using Jaeger by setting the environment variable JAEGER_AGENT_HOST to the hostname and port where Loki is running.

If you deploy with Helm, use the following command:

Bash 
$ helm upgrade --install loki loki/loki --set "loki.tracing.jaegerAgentHost=YOUR_JAEGER_AGENT_HOST"