Configure Grafana Loki per-tenant ingestion and stream rate limits
domain: grafana.com · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Set global defaults for ingestion_rate_mb and ingestion_burst_size_mb in the limits_config block to control when the rate_limited error is triggered.
Set per_stream_rate_limit and per_stream_rate_limit_burst to bound how fast any single stream (a unique label combination) can push data before hitting the per_stream_rate_limit error.
Set max_global_streams_per_user to raise or lower how many active streams a tenant can hold in ingester memory before hitting the stream_limit error.
Override any of these per tenant in the runtime overrides file instead of editing the global limits_config.
Monitor the loki_discarded_samples_total and loki_discarded_bytes_total metrics, broken out by the reason label, to see which specific limit is actually being hit in production.
Known gotchas
Grafana's own guidance recommends not setting per_stream_rate_limit above 5MB or per_stream_rate_limit_burst above 20MB, even though higher values are technically accepted.
rate_limited, per_stream_rate_limit, and stream_limit all return HTTP 429 Too Many Requests and are retryable — client and alerting logic needs the discarded-samples reason label to tell them apart, since each is fixed by adjusting a different setting.
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