How do I prevent the file from being created every time?

PowerShell Help
1

Hello,
I have a PowerShell script that stores Windows Event Logs in the processed_logs.json file. This script runs as a service and creates the processed_logs.json file each time. I am using Grafana Alloy to send this file to Grafana Loki server for analysis. Since the script creates the file regularly, Grafana Alloy also sends the file regularly to the Grafana Loki server, and the server contains duplicate data.
What solution do you suggest to solve this problem?

Thank you.

2

Is this a PowerShell issue? If you think it is you should provide the script, describe the current situation and the expected result.

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3

I haven’t used grafana alloy. I use Promtail to ship event logs to Loki. Loki will ignore log lines that are exact matches to previous logs with the same timestamp. However, I’m not sure how this works when you ship a json file. I would assume as long as the timestamp is updated each time, your db shouldn’t contain duplicate data. I don’t believe this is as much a powershell problem as much, as it is a de-duplication issue in loki. It could be that you just need to add a label ‘use_incoming_timestamp’ to allow the de-duplication to work properly. Or you can use loki.source.windowsevent | Grafana Alloy documentation and play around with the LogQL.

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4

what @Olaf is saying is that you’re asking questions about non-PowerShell things in a PowerShell forum.
If you want to ask questions about PowerShell stuff, you gotta show us some example code.

I don’t know if anyone here is going to be able to help with Grafana, Promtail, or Loki, but they can help with PowerShell.

If you’re using PS to make the json file to begin with, can you append to that existing file instead of overwriting it every time?

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5

Hi,
Thank you so much for your reply.
Promtail is deprecated and Alloy is a replacement for it.

6

Hi,
Thank you so much for your reply.
That’s a good idea. Instead of creating a file every time, just append the new log to the end of the previous file. I think Grafana Alloy will also automatically send only new lines to the server!

7

Hey,
Thanks for this information. I didn’t know promtail was deprecated…

Welp… Time to get to work.

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