Loki: From Naming Servers After Gods to Monitoring Them

#linux #loki #grafana #logaggregation

Prometheus tells you how your systems behave. Loki tells you what happened.
What I built:

→ Grafana Loki server with systemd (Rocky Linux)
→ Custom Promtail RPM for Kinoite OSTree compatibility
→ systemd-journal log shipping from servers and desktops
→ SELinux file contexts for GitHub-sourced binaries
→ Label-based log organization matching Prometheus scheme

What it solves:

✓ Centralized logs from servers and immutable desktops
✓ LogQL queries across all systems without SSH
✓ Historical log context for incident investigation
✓ Foundation for Grafana alerting and OnCall integration

Prometheus + Loki + Grafana = full observability stack.