Delete loki exporter

[atoulme]

Component(s)

exporter/loki

Describe the issue you're reporting

The loki exporter is deprecated. Its README says the code will be deleted on November 2024.

• remove the exporter from contrib
• Delete all code of the exporter

[github-actions]

Pinging code owners:

• exporter/loki: @gramidt @mar4uk

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[dehaansa]

Posted this in #38376 but reposting here as well as the issue's probably better for extended conversation if required.

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Spoke internally with some interested parties at Grafana and the consensus is that we would like to continue to maintain the lokiexporter component. There are still some pain points for certain users in migrating from the loki exporter to loki's native OTLP ingestion, and while we resolve those would like the component to still be released with contrib for the near future so they can continue to update their collectors for security fixes and other features without losing the exporter.

We don't have a new date to add to the readme, so I would propose we just remove that message. Removing the collector from the contrib distribution is certainly fine at this time.

We can add myself (& @\ArthurSens) as codeowners to ensure it gets proper maintenance as needed, but it has been stable and we expect maintenance to be minimal.

[VihasMakwana]

@atoulme @dehaansa I think we are good to close this issue. Please reopen if I'm mistaken.

[schahal]

Hi @dehaansa (please re-tag if there's someone more appropriate):

There are still some pain points for certain users in migrating from the loki exporter to loki's native OTLP ingestion, and while we resolve those would like the component to still be released with contrib for the near future so they can continue to update their collectors for security fixes and other features without losing the exporter.

Is there some place that's documenting/bubbling-up these pain points? Example: grafana/loki#13185 (comment)

e.g., is it just a matter of folks moving from Loki v2 to v3, or does the migration from loki exporter to the otlp one cause some performance degradation?

Motivation: Now that it's removed in #38376, we have to consider a migration to continue using updated otel-collector-contrib and want to see if it's already a non-starter.