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I can't recommend serious use of an all-in-one local Grafana Loki setup

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Re: I can't recommend serious use of an all-in-one local Grafana Loki setup

#81

Post by sph »

berkle4455 wrote: post #19

Grafana is a terribly ran company that once made a pretty decent OSS dashboard system. Stay away from them for anything but some charts.

I'm building a one-man SaaS and I'm currently shopping for a hosted monitoring service. Got the free trial of Grafana Cloud but I'm not a fan of their products in general. I know Prometheus, I have used DataDog in the past but seems crazy expensive spread thin with 1001 features.

What's a good all-in-one cloud monitoring solution that might optionally deal with logs as well?

Log monitoring is not actually a priority at this stage, I just want something to track metrics, chart them and to alert me when the servers are on fire.

Something open-source adjacent and not crazily expensive would be best. As I said I know Prometheus, but for some reason it's so flexible and free form I really do not enjoy using it.

Re: I can't recommend serious use of an all-in-one local Grafana Loki setup

#82

Post by the-grump »

dpkirchner wrote: post #45
striking wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there anything nonstandard or suspicious about this CLA?

I don't know. Do you really know what you're giving up by signing these? I'd have to study CLAs and hope that I am interpreting them correctly within our respective jurisdictions, or ask a lawyer. All of this stands in the way of contributing. And this is their decision to make, of course, but it is hostile to would-be contributors.

If you don't understand the legal implications of the license and CLA, please don't start rumours like "Grafana discourages contributions from the community, even for its documentation".

I could try explain to you what the purpose of a CLA is, but you could also easily put in the effort by going on Google.

Make sure to also look into the implications of contributing code with an OSS license, any license. That's as much contract as a CLA is.

Re: I can't recommend serious use of an all-in-one local Grafana Loki setup

#83

Post by cduzz »

eitland wrote: post #33
wiradikusuma wrote: post #23

There's also Signoz ( https://signoz.io ) a YC-backed company but open source with (recently) paid hosted.

Looked interesting so I did what I try to do every time, checked the license. Among other licenses I found this in one of the sub folders (/EE). > This software and associated documentation files (the "Software") may only be used in production, if you (and any entity that you represent) have agreed to, and are in compliance with, the SigNoz Subscription Terms of Service, available via email (hello@signoz.io) (the "En…

The base license seems like an MIT style license; with the comment that 'things in an ee/ directory are goverend by the license in that directory' -- so Amazon will just rewrite only that functionality when / if they decide to eat signoz's lunch.

Top level license:

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

Re: I can't recommend serious use of an all-in-one local Grafana Loki setup

#84

Post by _boffin_ »

edapted wrote: post #75

Ed here, (@slim-bean on github), one of the original authors and lead of the Loki project. The criticisms brought by Chris are valid, and it's good feedback. I just wish it was done so in a more constructive manner. I personally know what Loki is capable of, I've watched it grow from something tiny to something I'm incredibly proud of and in awe of. I run Loki on several Raspberry Pi's ingesting 20-100GB a day, I als…

Can you talk more about your setup and process with Loki on the RPIs, please

Re: I can't recommend serious use of an all-in-one local Grafana Loki setup

#85

Post by ilyt »

j0ner wrote: post #39

If you use Loki as the default logging driver with Docker and the Loki container shuts down, the rest of your containers will freeze up. This has been an issue for almost 3 years. https://github.com/grafana/loki/issues/2361

That sounds like docker issue on top of loki... regardless of the provider of the logging it should not do that by default. I can see some cases where you wouldn't ever want to lose a log message, but in vast majority of cases sacrificing some stdout logs for application actually working is preferable

Re: I can't recommend serious use of an all-in-one local Grafana Loki setup

#86

Post by obscurette »

dpkirchner wrote: post #5
ciguy wrote: post #3

Loki is open source. OP should take some of that frustrated energy and create a PR to improve the docs. I don't think this is a matter of Grafana Inc not wanting people to run Loki themselves but rather a resource constraints issue.

Unfortunately, Grafana discourages contributions from the community, even for its documentation.

I discovered that Grafana doesn't share the info how to build custom packages either – https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/30963

Re: I can't recommend serious use of an all-in-one local Grafana Loki setup

#87

Post by valyala »

Grafana Loki stores every data chunk in a separate file [1]. Data chunks are created every 2 hours per every stream [2] which receives at least a single log entry during the last 2 hours. This creates 12 * 30 = 360 chunk files per month per every active stream. If Grafana Loki is used for collecting logs from a thousand of services, and each service generates 10 different log streams, then the number of chunk files created by Loki during month will be 1000 * 10 * 360 = 3.6 millions [3]. This sounds like very strange design decision.

This was one of the reasons why we at VictoriaMetrics decided to start working on better solution for logs - VictoriaLogs [4].

[1] https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/GrafanaLok...

[2] https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/fundamentals/labels/

[3] https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/GrafanaLok...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu96Fj2l7ls&t=1950s

[5] https://www.slideshare.net/VictoriaMetrics/victorialogs-prev...

Re: I can't recommend serious use of an all-in-one local Grafana Loki setup

#88

Post by ilyt »

striking wrote: post #17
dpkirchner wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grafana requires you to sign a CLA before they will accept any work, which can be really expensive (unless you have in-house lawyers or don't care about understanding the real ramifications of a contract): https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/developers/cla/

Is there anything nonstandard or suspicious about this CLA?

The fact it is CLA means they want to have option to close the code.

I can see someone giving their work to OSS project not wanting the corporation that took it to have option to just take it and close.

Linux kernel uses "Developer Certificate of Origin" which is basically just "I certify that I contribute stuff I have rights for". That is enough.

CLA is entirely to detriment of actual OSS

Re: I can't recommend serious use of an all-in-one local Grafana Loki setup

#89

Post by ilyt »

dpkirchner wrote: post #45
striking wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there anything nonstandard or suspicious about this CLA?

I don't know. Do you really know what you're giving up by signing these? I'd have to study CLAs and hope that I am interpreting them correctly within our respective jurisdictions, or ask a lawyer. All of this stands in the way of contributing. And this is their decision to make, of course, but it is hostile to would-be contributors.

> Do you really know what you're giving up by signing these?

Yes. Everything. That's the point of near-every CLA.

So the corporation behind it have option to close the code if they want to, taking your contributions with it.

Some corps might not ever do it, but any company is one MBA away from "what we can cut from OSS version and move to enterprise to get more customers"?

Re: I can't recommend serious use of an all-in-one local Grafana Loki setup

#90

Post by striking »

dpkirchner wrote: post #45
striking wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there anything nonstandard or suspicious about this CLA?

I don't know. Do you really know what you're giving up by signing these? I'd have to study CLAs and hope that I am interpreting them correctly within our respective jurisdictions, or ask a lawyer. All of this stands in the way of contributing. And this is their decision to make, of course, but it is hostile to would-be contributors.

I do, actually. It looks like a standard CLA. It grants them a perpetual license to whatever code you're contributing and allows them to use it as they please, and not affecting any of your other rights. There's also some stuff in there about you only contributing code that you actually have the right to contribute, and how to manage edge cases around that. It's fairly standard when someone intends to be able to use your contribution as part of a greater open-core / closed-source distribution and to be able to simplify licensing matters. They have to protect their own interests and they're doing so in a manner that basically doesn't affect you at all.

Do you hire a lawyer any time you encounter an unfamiliar OSS license? I assume you don't, or you'd have a hard time using any modern packaging ecosystem.

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