Error "unable to create logs instance: invalid yaml positions file" when Grafana Agent is restarted

Grafana Alloy
1

Hi Team,

We are observing the below error (looks like positions file is getting corrupted) when Grafana Agent is restarted, maybe after windows machine shuts down abruptly or restarts.

level=error msg=“error creating the agent server entrypoint” err=“unable to apply config for xxx-logs: unable to create logs instance: invalid yaml positions file [grafana-agent-data
\positions-xxx.yaml]: yaml: control characters are not allowed”

We have to delete the positions file and then rerun the agent.

Could you kindly advise how this issue can be remediated?

2

Control characters are usually invisible characters from Windows non-textonly text editors. There are ways you can print them with cat on linux, and the recommendation usually is to not use a text editor that is prone to inject those characters when editing a configuration file.