Ingest ad-hoc logs from local windows directory

Grafana Configuration
1

Hello,
Brand new to Grafana, fairly new to Docker / Kubernetes.
I am experimenting trying to setup an ad-hoc log review solution with Grafana + Loki + Promtail.

I’ve got those three components up and running inside of a Docker desktop container, I can get to the Grafana local interface (http://localhost:3000), Loki appears ready (http://localhost:3100/ready)

In the Explore interface, there’s no labels or logs, I suspect something isn’t setup correctly with Promtail to scrape correctly.

I tried putting some files into /var/log in order to have the default static scraper config pick them up, but that wasn’t working, so I tried to update the config.yaml to point to C:\logs - which is what I want anyways - with no luck.

Sorry if this is super elementary - but I’ve rebuilt the whole container with Grafana + Loki + Promtail multiple times, following different install/setup guides with no success yet.

I must be missing something basic here.

Can anyone point to a tutorial how I can configure this to just pull in whatever random logs I throw into the C:\logs directory so that I can start using to do ad-hoc log reviews and learn the LogQL language?

Many thanks

2

for now so as not to learn 3+ new things, I would setup things outside of docker and run your 3 stacks on the windows machine itself. using windows exe for loki and promtail and grafana from latest zip for windows

3

Thanks, probably a good call.
I’ve been trying to use bind mounts to get a windows directory mounted to the promtail container with no luck updating the docker-compose.yaml … I think most of the issue right now is trying to get my containers access to the directories that I want.

I think I’ll try the Windows stack and go from there, thanks for the response.

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