Promtail: The Missing Link Logs and Metrics for your Monitoring Platform.

Promtail is the solution when you need to provide metrics that are only present on the log traces of the software you need to monitor to provide a consistent monitoring platform

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It is a common understanding that three pillars in the observability world help us to get a complete view of the status of our own platforms and systems: Logs, Traces, and Metrics.

To provide a summary about the differences between each of them:

• Metrics are the counters about the state of the different components from both a technical and a business view. So we can see here things like the CPU consumption, the number of requests, memory, or disk usage…
• Logs are the different messages that each of the pieces of software in our platform provides to understand its current behavior and detect some non-expected situations.
• Trace is the different data regarding the end-to-end request flow across the platform with the services and systems that have been part of that flow and data related to that concrete request.

We have solutions that claim to address all of them, mainly in the enterprise software with…