Just add agent to python docker image?

Grafana Grafana Agent
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1

I’ve got a python app I am deploying with Docker. For reasons that I can’t explain I can’t just run the Grafana agent in a separate container and give it access to the logs.
I am considering just copying the static agent binary into my python container, and manually run the agent before running my app in the container.

It doesn’t seem like a super optimal way to do it, but wondering what other smarter people do?

2

I see option one as what you mentioned i.e running agent binary with your app, the other is configuring docker custom logging driver and use loki plugin for that.

3

Thanks, i considered that, but I also don’t have the means to install a docker driver (since I won’t have access to the docker host). Also, I am using other feature of the agent (like traces)

4

Since you need other features of agent as well, not only log shipping, I don’t see any other way apart from running the binary together.

5

You can use opentelemetry python lib and export everything (metrics, logs, traces) via otlp exporter directly from the python app.

6

OK, so what I just tried was to install the agent into my docker using apt-get. That appeared to work fine. But when I tried to run it in my container I get the following error:
caller=diskstats_linux.go:267 level=error integration=node_exporter collector=diskstats msg="Failed to open directory, disabling udev device properties" path=/run/udev/data
FWIW this is running in a python 3.10 container which is bookworm if I am not mistaken

7

I’m still stuck here. I know I can export directly from my app without the agent, but I really like the idea of running a separate agent to properly handle the exporting properly and take the load off my app.
What am I missing?

8

You are missing that you are running in the container, so you don’t have standard OS options - you should disable all those default options (integrations), which don’t make sense in the container, e.g. node exporter in this case.

9

Yea, I think when I followed that path it looked like (according to the docs). And I am pretty sure I tried explicitly disabling it, but it seemed to ignore it. Maybe I had the config wrong. Let me try it again and see.