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.
Docker Driver Client
Grafana Loki officially supports a Docker plugin that will read logs from Docker containers and ship them to Loki. The plugin can be configured to send the logs to a private Loki instance or Grafana Cloud.
Docker plugins are not yet supported on Windows; see the Docker Engine managed plugin system documentation for more information.
Documentation on configuring the Loki Docker Driver can be found on the configuration page.
If you have any questions or issues using the Docker plugin feel free to open an issue in this repository.
Installing
The Docker plugin must be installed on each Docker host that will be running containers you want to collect logs from.
Run the following command to install the plugin:
docker plugin install grafana/loki-docker-driver:latest --alias loki --grant-all-permissions
To check installed plugins, use the docker plugin ls
command. Plugins that
have started successfully are listed as enabled:
$ docker plugin ls
ID NAME DESCRIPTION ENABLED
ac720b8fcfdb loki Loki Logging Driver true
Once the plugin is installed it can be configured.
Upgrading
The upgrade process involves disabling the existing plugin, upgrading, then re-enabling and restarting Docker:
docker plugin disable loki --force
docker plugin upgrade loki grafana/loki-docker-driver:latest --grant-all-permissions
docker plugin enable loki
systemctl restart docker
Uninstalling
To cleanly uninstall the plugin, disable and remove it:
docker plugin disable loki --force
docker plugin rm loki
Know Issues
The driver keeps all logs in memory and will drop log entries if Loki is not reachable and if the quantity of max_retries
has been exceeded. To avoid the dropping of log entries, setting max_retries
to zero allows unlimited retries; the drive will continue trying forever until Loki is again reachable. Trying forever may have undesired consequences, because the Docker daemon will wait for the Loki driver to process all logs of a container, until the container is removed. Thus, the Docker daemon might wait forever if the container is stuck.
Use Promtail’s Docker target or Docker service discovery to avoid this issue.