Promtail is distributed as a binary, Docker container, and Helm chart.
Every release includes binaries for Promtail which can be found on the Releases page.
# modify tag to most recent version
$ docker pull grafana/promtail:v1.2.0
Make sure that Helm is installed and deployed to your cluster. Then you can add Loki's chart repository to Helm:
$ helm repo add loki https://grafana.github.io/loki/charts
And the chart repository can be updated by running:
$ helm repo update
Finally, Promtail can be deployed with:
$ helm upgrade --install promtail loki/promtail --set "loki.serviceName=loki"
A DaemonSet
will deploy promtail
on every node within a Kubernetes cluster.
The DaemonSet deployment is great to collect the logs of all containers within a cluster. It's the best solution for a single-tenant model.
---Daemonset.yaml
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Daemonset
metadata:
name: promtail-daemonset
...
spec:
...
template:
spec:
serviceAccount: SERVICE_ACCOUNT
serviceAccountName: SERVICE_ACCOUNT
volumes:
- name: logs
hostPath: HOST_PATH
- name: promtail-config
configMap
name: promtail-configmap
containers:
- name: promtail-container
args:
- -config.file=/etc/promtail/promtail.yaml
volumeMounts:
- name: logs
mountPath: MOUNT_PATH
- name: promtail-config
mountPath: /etc/promtail
...
---configmap.yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
name: promtail-config
...
data:
promtail.yaml: YOUR CONFIG
---Clusterrole.yaml
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRole
metadata:
name: promtail-clusterrole
rules:
- apiGroups:
resources:
- nodes
- services
- pod
verbs:
- get
- watch
- list
---ServiceAccount.yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
name: promtail-serviceaccount
---Rolebinding
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k9s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRoleBinding
metadata:
name: promtail-clusterrolebinding
subjects:
- kind: ServiceAccount
name: promtail-serviceaccount
roleRef:
kind: ClusterRole
name: promtail-clusterrole
apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
The Sidecar method deploys promtail
as a sidecar container for a specific pod.
In a multi-tenant environment, this enables teams to aggregate logs for specific
pods and deployments.
---Deployment.yaml
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: my_test_app
...
spec:
...
template:
spec:
serviceAccount: SERVICE_ACCOUNT
serviceAccountName: SERVICE_ACCOUNT
volumes:
- name: logs
hostPath: HOST_PATH
- name: promtail-config
configMap
name: promtail-configmap
containers:
- name: promtail-container
args:
- -config.file=/etc/promtail/promtail.yaml
volumeMounts:
- name: logs
mountPath: MOUNT_PATH
- name: promtail-config
mountPath: /etc/promtail
...
...