Build Log Monitoring with Loki, Alloy & Kafka | Step-by-Step Tutorial | Devops Home Lab

🔥 Want to really learn DevOps and SRE? Don't just watch — build it.

In this hands-on tutorial, we walk through building a production-grade log monitoring system from scratch using modern tools like Grafana Loki, Grafana Alloy, Kafka, and Kubernetes — all deployed in a home lab environment with best practices.

🚀 What You'll Learn
Why logs matter: Short theoretical intro to log monitoring

How Kubernetes, Kafka, Loki, and Alloy work together

Step-by-step system setup in your home lab

GitOps-style deployment with ArgoCD

How to persist logs to Google Cloud Storage (GCS)

Real-world SRE & DevOps best practices applied at home

🧰 Tools & Technologies Used
Kubernetes

Kafka Cluster

Grafana Alloy

Grafana Loki

ArgoCD

Grafana Dashboard

Google Cloud Storage (GCS)

👨‍💻 Who This Is For
Aspiring DevOps & SRE engineers

Experienced professionals looking to practice real-world setups

Tech enthusiasts building home labs

🔗 Resources
📂 GitHub Repo with All Configs: github.com/rafimojabi/devopszen



In this hands-on lab, we bring up a Kubernetes cluster and a complete log aggregation and monitoring system using Grafana Loki. See how a log monitoring system works under the hood, from setup to visualizing your data with Grafana. This practical tutorial is ideal for DevOps engineers and anyone interested in improving system observability.

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