Migrate from Promtail to Grafana Alloy

[mbfm]

Promtail is being deprecated. We should migrate to Grafana Alloy instead.

Promtail is now deprecated and will enter into Long-Term Support (LTS) beginning Feb. 13, 2025. This means that Promtail will no longer receive any new feature updates, but it will receive critical bug fixes and security fixes. Commercial support will end after the LTS phase, which we anticipate will extend for about 12 months until February 28, 2026. End-of-Life (EOL) phase for Promtail will begin once LTS ends. Promtail is expected to reach EOL on March 2, 2026, afterwards no future support or updates will be provided. All future feature development will occur in Grafana Alloy.

If you are currently using Promtail, you should plan your migration to Alloy. The Alloy migration documentation includes a migration tool for converting your Promtail configuration to an Alloy configuration with a single command.

Source: https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/send-data/promtail/

Migration guide: https://grafana.com/docs/alloy/latest/set-up/migrate/from-promtail/

[brtmax]

Hi, is this one still available? Just found out about this project at the Doktoranden Marketplace in Sindelfingen and would like to contribute!

[mbfm]

Hi there, yes, this issue is still open and can be taken.

If you haven't done so already, you'll want to read the CONTRIBUTING.md for some basic pointers how to contribute.

For this particular issue, it's probably easiest, if you set up the TestEnv in "Test Mode" on your system: https://opendut.eclipse.dev/book/development/testenv/index.html
This will basically give you a virtual machine in which the openDuT Backend runs, along with the monitoring stack. You can change the configuration files and re-run cargo theo testenv start in the VM to apply the changes. Ultimately, you'll want the logs from the services collected by Promtail/Alloy to show up in the Grafana dashboard.

We do have separate deployment code for production use (the "LocalEnv"), but it should be fairly easy to adapt once its done in the TestEnv. I did also just copy the promtail.yml from the LocalEnv over to the TestEnv (they probably should have matched to begin with), so if you do tackle this, be sure to work off of the latest commits on the development branch.

If you have any questions, do let us know. 🙂

[mbfm]

Implemented in 718ec95 by @brtmax. Thanks for the help!