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Grafana Loki – Installation

Overview

Grafana Loki is a log aggregation system designed to work with both Prometheus and Grafana. It stores logs with minimal indexing by using only labels. This makes it fast, efficient and scalable. Loki supports multi-tenant setups, log querying via LogQL, and integrates with other 3rd party tools like the Promtail agent, and Docker for log ingestion. It uses HTTP API on port 3100 and can store data in your local filesystems, object stores, or cloud platforms.

Resources

Installation

Update your system

sudo apt update

Install dependencies (“curl” – to fetch Loki binaries, “unzip” – to inflate the binary)

sudo apt install -y curl unzip

Download Loki binary (latest stable version) Note this binary is for my Raspberry Pi 5 using ARM technology. With “curl” the “-L” will allow “curl” to follow a redirect and not fail. The “-O” say save the file from filename and not a generic name like say “output.html“.

curl -LO https://github.com/grafana/loki/releases/latest/download/loki-linux-arm64.zip

Unzip the binary. Afte inflation the zip file will be called “loki-linux-arm64“

unzip loki-linux-arm64.zip

Move it to “/usr/local/bin” where 3rd party utilities are usually located. Make it executable globally.

sudo mv loki-linux-arm64 /usr/local/bin/loki

sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/loki

Create the Loki configuration “YAML” file using your favorite editor

vim loki-config.yaml

Insert the below configuration. Note that this is a minimum configuration setup and sets up Loki with local storage and no authentication. We can fix that later on.

auth_enabled: false

server:
  http_listen_port: 3100
  grpc_listen_port: 9095

ingester:
  lifecycler:
    ring:
      kvstore:
        store: inmemory
      replication_factor: 1
    address: 127.0.0.1
  chunk_idle_period: 1h
  max_chunk_age: 1h

schema_config:
  configs:
    - from: 2025-01-01
      store: boltdb-shipper
      object_store: filesystem
      schema: v11
      index:
        prefix: index_
        period: 24h

storage_config:
  boltdb_shipper:
    active_index_directory: /tmp/loki/index
    cache_location: /tmp/loki/cache
  filesystem:
    directory: /tmp/loki/chunks

limits_config:
  allow_structured_metadata: false

table_manager:
  retention_deletes_enabled: true
  retention_period: 168h  # 7 days

Start Loki manually. You should see Loki listening on port 3100. You can now point Grafana to it as a data source. Best to run “loki” under “sudo” as this gives it permission to create and then write to “/var/loki”.

sudo loki -config.file=loki-config.yaml

Establish auto startup on boot. Create a “systemd” service file.

sudo vim /etc/systemd/system/loki.service

In the “loki.service” file insert the following text and modify “{path}” configuration.

[Unit]
Description=Grafana Loki Log Aggregator
After=network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/loki -config.file=/{path}/loki-config.yaml
Restart=always
User=root
Group=root

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Reload all the services run by systems and enable Loki to automatically start on boot.

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

sudo systemctl enable loki

Start Loki and check its status.

sudo systemctl start loki

sudo systemctl status loki

If the “loki” status looks good with enabled flags, then you’re good to go. I hope this instruction post helped.