Description
As of 2025, Promtail has been marked as deprecated in the documentation here: https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/send-data/promtail/
Promtail is now deprecated and will enter into Long-Term Support (LTS) beginning Feb. 13, 2025. This means that Promtail will no longer receive any new feature updates, but it will receive critical bug fixes and security fixes. Commercial support will end after the LTS phase, which we anticipate will extend for about 12 months until February 28, 2026. End-of-Life (EOL) phase for Promtail will begin once LTS ends. Promtail is expected to reach EOL on March 2, 2026, afterwards no future support or updates will be provided. All future feature development will occur in Grafana Alloy.
If you are currently using Promtail, you should plan your migration to Alloy. The Alloy migration documentation includes a migration tool for converting your Promtail configuration to an Alloy configuration with a single command.
However, the following documentations are still giving the example of setting up Promtail + Loki:
- Install using Tanka: https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/setup/install/tanka/
- Install using Docker: https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/setup/install/docker/
- Install locally: https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/setup/install/local/
Which is very confusing. Perhaps the documentation wants a quick way to get users started? But there should be a sign for "not recommended"/"for testing only" sign on the page.