What is Promtail?

Promtail is an agent which ships the contents of local logs to a private Loki instance or Grafana Cloud. It is usually deployed to every machine that has applications needed to be monitored. It discovers targets, attaches labels to log streams and pushes them to Loki. It acts as a log collector, similar to Fluentd or Logstash, but is specifically designed to work well with Loki.