If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of Splunk, and using Splunk to solve everyday problems. But while Splunk excels at being able to eat nearly any kind of event or data, sometimes you need a more specific tool when working with a specific type of data.
That’s where Prometheus, Loki, and Grafana all come in. Prometheus is a time series database built for storing metrics. Loki is a log collection system which scales horizontally and is useful for collecting application logs, and Grafana is the dashboard app which is used to view metrics from either platform!
I wanted to learn more about each of these apps, and I figured the best way to do so was to build out something in Docker that let me ingest data immediately, and then to build some sample dashboards on top of that. I then open sourced it, and the entire project can be found at https://github.com/dmuth/grafana-playground
Getting Started
First, clone the repo and start up all of the Docker containers:
git clone https://github.com/dmuth/grafana-playground.git
cd grafana-playground
docker-compose up -d
This will start up several containers, some of which will ingest data, some of which will store data.
Continue reading “Learning Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki with Docker”