As developers, we are often asked to include robust logging (hopefully structured) and metrics for later use in our deployed environment for operations reasons.

However, we don't have great ways to consume them ourselves or even verify our work.

This git repository gives you a mostly working example of how to do this without a ton of configuration.

Loki is an efficient log aggregation system. Its role is the equivalent of ElasticSearch in the typical ELK/EFK stacks you may be familiar with.

Vector is a logging agent. It collects logs from all of our containers and sends them to Loki.

It is configured via docker/vector.yaml.

Prometheus is the most popular time series metrics storage.

It is configured via docker/prometheus.yml.

Grafana is the most popular visualization tool used by operations teams.

With this set up you can quickly explore the metrics and logs that are being collected. You can also create dashboards of information that can be useful during local development and debugging.

Another reason you may want to create a Dashboard is to verify it's set up and then export it for use in your deployed environments.

Q: Doesn't this take up a bunch of resources on my laptop?

I too was worried about this and was pleasantly surprised how lightweight it ended up being. I'm on an M1 Macbook Pro (2021) and it ends up taking up about 200-300 MBs of RAM and 1-2% of CPU. I would imagine the CPU would be a bit higher on x86 architectures than arm, but wouldn't imagine it would even approach 5%.

Q: What do I need to do to log in my own code?

All you need to do is have your code emit logging data to stdout, preferably in a structured format like JSON. This makes it far easier to search and filter your log data in meaningful ways.

You can adjust the Vector, Prometheus, and/or Grafana configurations defined in their respective YAML files and compose.yml itself. For example, you may need to add a transform to your Vector configuration to help filter or shape your log data before sending it on to Loki.