docs/sources/release-notes/v3-6.md
Grafana Labs and the Loki team are excited to announce the release of Loki 3.6. Here's a summary of new enhancements and important fixes.
For a full list of all changes and fixes, refer to the CHANGELOG
{{< admonition type="note" >}} See the deprecations section for important information about the Loki Helm charts. {{< /admonition >}}
Key features in Loki 3.6.0 include the following:
Horizontally scalable compactor: The Compactor in Loki is a singleton service that compacts the index and applies retention, including processing delete requests. Because it can only be scaled vertically, it limits how many resources you can add to speed things up when the workload increases in bigger cells. This release adds a horizontally scalable compactor, to speed up processing large delete requests or catching up if there has been a lag in processing for some reason. Note that the horizontally scalable compactor delegates deletion work to the workers. Loki continues to perform compaction and apply retention in the main Compactor. For more information, refer to the documentation.
OTel: Loki has been refactored to use the OpenTelemetry tracing library instead of the OpenTracing library. (#17859). Note that Loki can still be configured using JAEGER_ env vars and still exports traces in JAEGER_ format.
meta-monitoring: Moves the meta-monitoring responsibilities from the Grafana meta-monitoring Helm chart to the widely supported Grafana Kubernetes Monitoring Helm chart. This was implemented in two PRs: Meta Monitoring Loki v2 (Part 1) - Telemetry Collection (#16665) (2d0bbfd) and Meta Monitoring Loki v2 (Part 2) - Loki Mixin's (#16962) (93360f6).
Helm charts: The Grafana Developer Advocates launched a pilot Community Helm Maintainers group at the end of June made up of Grafana Champions who expressed interest in helping maintain the Loki Helm chart. We have resumed regular releases of the Loki Helm chart and reduced the backlog of open Loki Helm chart pull requests from around 150 to less than 40. For information about recent changes, refer to the Helm chart CHANGELOG.
UI: We have moved the Loki UI to a Grafana Plugin. The static Operational UI is not going away, and all the APIs that serve it will remain in Loki. The JavaScript that serves the UI, however, has been moved to the Loki Operational UI Grafana plugin (#19390).
Docs: Published a third Cloud Deployment Guide, this one for Google Cloud Platform (#17503). Added links to three log related Learning paths to the Loki docs (#17956). Revised the LogQL query page (#16286) and added a LogQL video (#18111). Added a caution to the Labels topic and added a new topic with instructions how to modify the default OpenTelemetry resource attributes that Loki converts to labels (#17958). Updated the caching topic (#17420).
{{< admonition type="note" >}} Note that when appropriate, documentation updates have been backported to previous releases. {{< /admonition >}}
Other improvements include the following:
block_builder config to helm chart (#17451) (a9808a1)startupProbe to memcached(#19166)startupProbe to memcached exporter(#19165)--log.level parameter to help with diagnosing errors when using logcli. (#19136)unwrap as a projection
(#19409)Simple Scalable Deployment (SSD) mode is being deprecated. The deprecation notice was posted in the CHANGELOG for Helm charts version 6.52.0. The timeline for the deprecation is to be determined (TBD), but will happen before Loki 4.0 is released.
Loki Helm charts deprecations: The following Community maintained Helm charts have been deprecated:
{{< admonition type="note" >}} In June 2025, Grafana recruited three Grafana Champions and launched a three month pilot program to maintain the Loki Helm chart. The pilot proved successful, attracting more Grafana champions, and led to the Champions asking to take over maintenance of the chart entirely. The grafana-community/helm-charts repository launched on January 30, 2026. Effective March 16, 2026, the Grafana Loki Helm chart will be forked to the new repository grafana-community/helm-charts. The motivation behind this change is to accelerate development and enable direct community maintenance, as outlined in grafana/helm-charts#3955. The Champions will attempt to make this transition as seamless as possible. {{< /admonition >}}
One of the focuses of Loki 3.0 was cleaning up unused code and old features that had been previously deprecated but not removed. Loki 3.0 removed a number of previous deprecations and introduces some new deprecations. Some of the main areas with changes include:
Grafana Agent - Long term support for Grafana Agent ended October 31, 2025. For information on how to migrate to Grafana Alloy, see the migration docs.
Promtail is deprecated, as the code has been merged into Grafana Alloy. Commercial support will end February 28, 2026. You can find migration documentation and a utility to convert your Promtail configuration to Alloy configuration in the Alloy documentation. Note that this deprecation does NOT include the lambda-promtail client.
Deprecated storage options including the deprecation of the BoltDB store.
To learn more about breaking changes in this release, refer to the Upgrade guide.
For important upgrade guidance, refer to the Upgrade Guide.
go.opentelemetry.io/otel/sdk to v1.43.0 (#21480) (47fb29e).golang.org/x/crypto to v0.52.0 (#22212) (424e5ff).golang.org/x/net to v0.55.0 (#22213) (90ae8f3).golang.org/x/sys to v0.44.0 (#22214) (49b9a22).golang.org/x/sys to v0.44.0 in cmd/dataobj-inspect (release-3.6.x) (#22215) (c696c66).golang.org/x/crypto to v0.52.0 in cmd/segment-inspect (release-3.6.x) (#22216) (807ffd7).golang.org/x/net to v0.55.0 in cmd/segment-inspect (release-3.6.x) (#22217) (7081875).golang.org/x/sys to v0.44.0 in cmd/segment-inspect (release-3.6.x) (#22218) (36deca1).golang.org/x/net to v0.55.0 in pkg/push (release-3.6.x) (#22224) (0c53ce1).github.com/containerd/containerd/v2 to v2.0.9 (#22204) (ed38a68).github.com/prometheus/prometheus to v0.311.3 in cmd/segment-inspect (release-3.6.x) (#22205) (bfd37e4).go.opentelemetry.io/otel to v1.41.0 in cmd/segment-inspect (release-3.6.x) (#22206) (0ed7bce).github.com/grafana/loki/v3 to v3.6.4 in cmd/dataobj-inspect (release-3.6.x) (#22209) (d6117ed).github.com/grafana/loki/v3 to v3.6.4 in cmd/segment-inspect (release-3.6.x) (#22210) (186b9a9).This release does not exist. We triggered the release pipeline, but it decided to play an April Fool's joke on us and did not generate the release.
go.opentelemetry.io/otel/sdk from v1.38.0 to v1.40.0 (#21115) (d1ab148).__aggregated_metric__ in /series and /labels. This will alleviate confusion for people using a tool like logcli series --analyze-labels for cardinality analysis. (#14677) (4b0aaaa)instance_enable_ipv6 from common to all components (#18254) (5bc5853)SortMerge which caused rows to be skipped due to incorrect sorting (#18334) (4fbe7c1)monitoring block (#19012)json parser on query path (#18056)