How Log Collectors Collect and Label Your Logs

A container log line on disk contains no idea which pod wrote it. Everything you filter by later is constructed by the collector at collection time. What the file actually looks like, how collectors find it, where every label comes from, and why that design decides the health of your logging stack.

September 2026

Ten Things to Get Right Before You Run Loki in Production

Deployment mode, object storage, label cardinality, multi-tenancy and auth, cross-cluster shipping, and the failures that are silent rather than loud. Written after moving a Loki install twice and debugging an object store that corrupted everything it was given.

August 2026