SOLVED: Trouble parsing timestamp in promtail

Grafana Loki
1

I have log files with an almost RFC3339Nano formatted timestamp. But only almost.
When trying to set the log entry pipeline as part of a pipeline, promtail complains about “extracted data did not contain a timestamp”.

A log line can look like this:

227320 20200519T232044.113+0200 WARN hostname1 System.Scheduler.

What are my options for using that timestamp in the pipeline, getting correct log entry timestamps in Loki (and Grafana) down the road?

2

Solved it.

You can enter any custom date format in the format section in promtail’s YAML config file. In my case it was as simple as:

      - timestamp:
            source: time
            format: 20060102T150405.000-0700

Solved!