Prerequisites

Everything you need before starting the PLG observability stack.

Before you start the PLG stack, make sure your machine meets the requirements below. The stack runs five containers and requires access to system logs, so a few things must be in place first.

Required software

WSL (Ubuntu) — the stack is designed to run inside Windows Subsystem for Linux using an Ubuntu distribution. All commands in this documentation assume a WSL/Ubuntu shell.

Docker — Docker Engine must be installed and running inside your WSL environment.

Docker Compose — Docker Compose V2 (the docker compose plugin, not the standalone docker-compose binary) is required.

Verify your installation

Run the following commands to confirm both tools are available and respond correctly before continuing.

1. Check Docker

   docker --version
   

   You should see output similar to:

   Docker version 24.0.5, build ced0996
   
2. Check Docker Compose

   docker compose version
   

   You should see output similar to:

   Docker Compose version v2.20.2
   

   If this command fails or shows docker-compose (with a hyphen) as not found, you are likely using the legacy standalone binary. This project requires the Compose V2 plugin. Install it via Docker Desktop or by following the official Docker Compose installation guide.

3. Confirm Docker is running

   docker info
   

   If Docker is not running, this command will return an error. Start the Docker daemon before proceeding.

Recommended system resources

The stack starts five containers simultaneously. The table below lists the minimum recommended resources to run the stack without performance issues.

Resource	Recommended minimum
CPU	2 cores
RAM	4 GB available
Disk	2 GB free

Running the stack on a machine with less than 4 GB of available RAM may cause containers — particularly Loki or Grafana — to restart unexpectedly under load.

Host log access for Promtail

Promtail collects logs from /var/log on the host and forwards them to Loki. The docker-compose.yml mounts this directory into the Promtail container in read-only mode:

volumes:
  - /var/log:/var/log:ro

Your WSL user must be able to read files in /var/log. If Promtail starts but no logs appear in Grafana, check that /var/log/*.log files are readable by your current user. You can verify this with:

ls -l /var/log/*.log