You Need Loki and Promtail if you want the Grafana Logs Panel!

We will look at the new Logs panel in Grafana, but we will first need to setup a data source that can read log files.

The requirements to follow and try the commands in this article exactly are to have Ubuntu 20.04, with Grafana installed. If you want to know more about installing Grafana, then I have an article here showing How to Install and Start Grafana.

In this article, we will:

1. Install Loki Binary and Start as a Service
2. Install Promtail Binary and Start as a Service
3. Configure Loki Data Source and Explore
4. Create some errors in the System Journal and see the data displayed in real time

Install Loki Binary and Start as a Service

To keep this as simple as possible, I will install the Loki binary as a service on my existing Grafana server. My Ubuntu server is an AMD 64, so I install the loki-linux-amd64.gz Visit https://github.com/grafana/loki/releases/ to see the latest versions and binaries to download for your architecture.

cd /usr/local/bin
sudo curl -fSL -o loki.gz "https://github.com/grafana/loki/releases/download/v1.6.1/loki-linux-amd64.gz"