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troubleshooting.md

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Troubleshooting Promtail

This document describes known failure modes of promtail on edge cases and the adopted trade-offs.

A tailed file is truncated while promtail is not running

Given the following order of events:

  1. promtail is tailing /app.log
  2. promtail current position for /app.log is 100 (byte offset)
  3. promtail is stopped
  4. /app.log is truncated and new logs are appended to it
  5. promtail is restarted

When promtail is restarted, it reads the previous position (100) from the positions file. Two scenarios are then possible:

  • /app.log size is less than the position before truncating
  • /app.log size is greater than or equal to the position before truncating

If the /app.log file size is less than the previous position, then the file is detected as truncated and logs will be tailed starting from position 0. Otherwise, if the /app.log file size is greater than or equal to the previous position, promtail can't detect it was truncated while not running and will continue tailing the file from position 100.

Generally speaking, promtail uses only the path to the file as key in the positions file. Whenever promtail is started, for each file path referenced in the positions file, promtail will read the file from the beginning if the file size is less than the offset stored in the position file, otherwise it will continue from the offset, regardless the file has been truncated or rolled multiple times while promtail was not running.

Loki is unavailable

For each tailing file, promtail reads a line, process it through the configured pipeline_stages and push the log entry to Loki. Log entries are batched together before getting pushed to Loki, based on the max batch duration client.batch-wait and size client.batch-size-bytes, whichever comes first.

In case of any error while sending a log entries batch, promtail adopts a "retry then discard" strategy:

  • promtail retries to send log entry to the ingester up to maxretries times
  • If all retries fail, promtail discards the batch of log entries (which will be lost) and proceeds with the next one

You can configure the maxretries and the delay between two retries via the backoff_config in the promtail config file:

clients:
  - url: INGESTER-URL
    backoff_config:
      minbackoff: 100ms
      maxbackoff: 10s
      maxretries: 10

The following table shows an example of the total delay applied by the backoff algorithm with minbackoff: 100ms and maxbackoff: 10s:

Retry Min delay Max delay Total min delay Total max delay
1 100ms 200ms 100ms 200ms
2 200ms 400ms 300ms 600ms
3 400ms 800ms 700ms 1.4s
4 800ms 1.6s 1.5s 3s
5 1.6s 3.2s 3.1s 6.2s
6 3.2s 6.4s 6.3s 12.6s
7 6.4s 10s 12.7s 22.6s
8 6.4s 10s 19.1s 32.6s
9 6.4s 10s 25.5s 42.6s
10 6.4s 10s 31.9s 52.6s
11 6.4s 10s 38.3s 62.6s
12 6.4s 10s 44.7s 72.6s
13 6.4s 10s 51.1s 82.6s
14 6.4s 10s 57.5s 92.6s
15 6.4s 10s 63.9s 102.6s
16 6.4s 10s 70.3s 112.6s
17 6.4s 10s 76.7s 122.6s
18 6.4s 10s 83.1s 132.6s
19 6.4s 10s 89.5s 142.6s
20 6.4s 10s 95.9s 152.6s

Log entries pushed after a promtail crash / panic / abruptly termination

When promtail shuts down gracefully, it saves the last read offsets in the positions file, so that on a subsequent restart it will continue tailing logs without duplicates neither losses.

In the event of a crash or abruptly termination, promtail can't save the last read offsets in the positions file. When restarted, promtail will read the positions file saved at the last sync period and will continue tailing the files from there. This means that if new log entries have been read and pushed to the ingester between the last sync period and the crash, these log entries will be sent again to the ingester on promtail restart.

However, it's important to note that Loki will reject all log lines received in what it perceives is out of order. If promtail happens to crash, it may re-send log lines that were sent prior to the crash. The default behavior of Promtail is to assign a timestamp to logs at the time it read the entry from the tailed file. This would result in duplicate log lines being sent to Loki; to avoid this issue, if your tailed file has a timestamp embedded in the log lines, a timestamp stage should be added to your pipeline.