Two changes driven by the fleet syslog rollout (~4 -> 106 senders) and the
operator enabling Yealink's prepend-MAC on the autoprovisioned handsets.
1. Alloy: lift the MAC into a real `mac` label.
UDP syslog offers only three possible identities: sender IP, RFC3164
HOSTNAME, message body.
- source_ip is DHCP (observed lease 1200s) so it is NOT stable: a re-IP
looks like a new device, and a recycled IP silently inherits another
phone's history.
- HOSTNAME is useless: Yealink puts its subsystem there (sua/GUI/cfg/sys),
and after prepend-MAC the bracketed MAC lands in that slot and is rejected
as a hostname, so the label is simply absent on new lines.
So the body is the only place identity exists. A loki.process regex stage
extracts it. Non-Yealink senders (the D-Link switches) don't match and pass
through with no mac label. Cardinality is safe: mac is 1:1 with a device and
does not multiply against source_ip.
Verified on a disposable alloy+loki rig by replaying 406 REAL captured lines:
0 parse errors, both branches confirmed — Yealink lines get
mac=80:5e:0c:b2:44:d3, the switch line passes through with no mac label.
2. Dashboard: identity by MAC, comparative panels, no invented thresholds.
- Variable is now label_values(mac) with allValue ".+" (not ".*") so "All"
matches only streams that HAVE a mac — excluding switches automatically.
- Removed the absolute colour thresholds. They were derived from a ~4-hour
sample of TWO atypically verbose handsets and were already wrong at 2
phones (actionable errors read 537 against a red line of 800; scheduler
timeouts 193 against yellow at 150). They were fleet-wide SUMS, so they
scale with phone count rather than with health. The fleet onboarded today,
so no representative 24h baseline exists to replace them with — panels are
comparative (worst offenders) until a week of real data exists. The one
surviving threshold is "phones failing provisioning" >= 1, which is a
qualitative fault rather than a magnitude.
- Stats now count AFFECTED DEVICES, not fleet-wide line totals.
- "Phones reporting" -> "Phones heard from", documented as NOT a health
count: most of the fleet runs at Yealink default log level 3 (Error) and
is silent unless something breaks. A silent phone is a healthy phone.
- Registration/DHCP panels labelled level-6-only: they key on info/notice
lines that level-3 phones never send, so an absent phone there means
"quiet", not "unregistered".
- Added "loudest phones by log volume" to surface handsets left at level 6
(two of them are ~80% of all volume).
- refresh 1m -> 5m.
Verified by firing all 14 panel queries CONCURRENTLY against a sink loaded
with replayed real data: 14/14 return data, 0 rejected. Last time these were
verified sequentially, which is what let the 429 bug ship.
Note: data predating the MAC rollout has no mac label and won't appear.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Confirmed via packet capture: a Yealink phone and (per RouterOS's known
default behavior) the fleet's routers send classic BSD-style syslog,
not RFC5424. Alloy's loki.source.syslog defaults to RFC5424-only and
was silently dropping every message ("expecting a version value in the
range 1-999"). syslog_format = "rfc3164" fixes it, but that argument
only exists from Alloy v1.5.0 onward (confirmed empirically against
v1.4.3, which fails config load) — bump the pin accordingly. v1.5.0 is
an adjacent minor release, not the kind of large version jump that hit
the Loki/Grafana :latest kernel-incompatibility bug fixed earlier.
Alloy receives syslog on 514/udp and 1514/tcp from network devices,
forwards to a local Loki instance; Grafana provisioned with Loki as
default datasource. Compose bind-mounts config from
/mnt/containers/logging/... on the host (staged separately) since
Portainer's GitOps pull only fetches the compose file, not the repo's
other files.
pipistrelloandClaude Opus 4.8