Forked version of the observability stack from James Turland.
Replaces Grafana Promtail with Alloy for Docker container monitoring and logs. Replaces InfluxDB and Telegraf, to focus on Prometheus and Mimir for monitoring data storage (short / long term) and alerts.
Read changelog for itemised changes.
The video and repo from James Turland is a great resource for an observability stack.
However some things have changed in the years since it's release. The biggest change being the release of Grafana Alloy as a replacement for Promtail, and with that it introduces a different paradigm and API.
Promtail reached EOL in 2026, making Alloy a requirement.
InfluxDB, present in the stack for other purposes, was used as long-term storage for Prometheus. However the lack of PromQL support made it difficult to create like for life dashboards. Grafana Mimir was used instead as a Prometheus long-term data store.
Telegraf was used in the previous version of stack as a telemetry collector. However the introduction of Alloy makes it redundant. When planning to use InfluxDB for long-term metrics storage, Telegraf was used as an ingestion pipeline, but the replacement of InfluxDB with Mimir, makes Telegraf redundant again.
- Grafana Alloy: runner, and main orchestrator
- Grafana Loki: log collector, mostly for Docker containers
- Prometheus: metric collector, short term storage and alerting
- Grafana Mimir: long term storage for Prometheus metrics
- Grafana: visualising tool for metrics and logs
The data collection flow:
The data visualization flow:
Pre-configured with
- 3 data sources: Loki, Prometheus, Mimir
- 2 dashboards: cAdvisor, cAdvisor [long-term]
- Predefined user and password (from .env)
Prerequisites:
- Docker engine, installed locally
- Clone the repo
- .env file in the shape of
.env-example
The stack was designed for use with Linux.
Added a helpful Makefile for scripting.
Build the stack with make build.
Start the stack with make up.
Tear down the stack with make down.
Hook into logs with make logs.
Grafana on http://localhost:3000.
Alloy on http://localhost:12345.
Prometheus on http://localhost:9090.
Alan Ionita