I was surprised to see Grafana deprecate Promtail, which I have in action all-over the place: both on VMs and Kubernetes clusters to collect quite some different log formats. Consequently, the pipelines looks lengthy.
Well, taken from announcements and docs, Alloy is sooo much better than Promtail:
- yet another configuration language
- no command line debugging (promtail --dry-run --inspect)
- Many more features, maximizing security issue potential (lessons learned from log4)
- easy transformation of configuration, kind-of drop-in replacement (actually, not working)
Well, my profession is not re-inventing the wheel again and again. Alloy is ridiculously over-sized and over-designed for my use case, with zero present or future benefit to expect.
Back to Promtail, doing productive work now.