Setting Up Nginx Access Log Visualization with Loki and Grafana

A customer needed a simple way to view website traffic without using Google or Baidu analytics, so the solution chosen is the Loki‑Grafana stack combined with Nginx.

Install Nginx (standard installation) and download binary releases of Promtail and Loki, then start them with their respective configuration files.

Promtail configuration (saved as promtail.yaml ) sets the HTTP listening port, positions file, Loki push endpoint, and a scrape job for Nginx logs, including a replace stage to mask IP addresses:

server:
  http_listen_port: 9080
  grpc_listen_port: 0

positions:
  filename: /tmp/positions.yaml

clients:
  - url: http://localhost:3100/loki/api/v1/push

scrape_configs:
- job_name: nginx
  pipeline_stages:
  - replace:
      expression: '(?:[0-9]{1,3}\.){3}([0-9]{1,3})'
      replace: '***'
  static_configs:
  - targets:
      - localhost
    labels:
      job: nginx_access_log
      host: expatsxxxxs
      agent: promtail
      __path__: /var/log/nginx/expatshxxxxs.access.log

Modify Nginx to output logs in JSON format by adding a log_format json_analytics escape=json block that captures fields such as $msec , $remote_addr , $request , $status , $upstream_addr , $geoip_country_code , etc.

log_format json_analytics escape=json '{'
  "msec": "$msec", 
  "connection": "$connection", 
  ...
  "geoip_country_code": "$geoip_country_code"'
}';

Install GeoIP libraries ( yum -y install GeoIP GeoIP-data GeoIP-devel ), then recompile Nginx with --with-http_geoip_module to enable the geoip directive. Replace the old binary using a graceful reload ( kill -USR2 ).

After confirming Nginx emits JSON logs, start Grafana via Docker:

docker run -d -p 3000:3000 grafana/grafana

Log in with the default admin/admin credentials, add Loki as a data source, and verify log ingestion using the Explore view.

Import a pre‑built dashboard (by ID) to visualize request counts, response times, status codes, and geo‑IP information. The world‑map panel initially lacks map tiles, so install the required plugin:

grafana-cli plugins install grafana-worldmap-panel

Restart Grafana, reload the dashboard, and the map now displays (subject to external map access restrictions). The final setup provides a quick, self‑hosted solution for detailed website access analytics using Loki and Grafana.