Since re-launching my blog, I wanted to monitor traffic and logs more closely. Nothing groundbreaking, but it had been a while since I'd run Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki on my own hardware.
\nTurns out there's this handy all-in-one docker-compose setup that runs on Synology NAS. It fired up with minimal fuss, and soon I had metrics machinery humming in my basement—except the package didn't include Loki. A quick docs consultation got it running alongside the rest.
\nMy blog is a static site hosted via AWS S3 and CloudFront. Both services dump logs into an S3 bucket, but I'd never bothered reading them before—and didn't want to start now. Instead, I loaded up Claude.ai and described my problem:
\n\n\nI want to get logs out of CloudFront. I have enabled new-style log delivery that stores gzipped JSON logs in an S3 bucket at s3://lmorchard-logs/blog.lmorchard.com/ with names like E5YXU82LZHZCM.2025-06-04-04.d024d283.gz
\nCan you help me write a script for my home Loki server to download only new log files and push them into Loki?
\n
Claude stepped right up:
\n\n\nI'll help you create a script to process CloudFront logs and push them to Loki. Let me write a Python script that tracks processed files and handles the gzipped JSON format.
\n
After some vibey iteration, we landed at this artifact:
\nIt's quite verbose and could use some tightening up. But, I really don't care—it does the quick & dirty needful.
\nI wrote zero Python. I just henpecked Claude to add features until the script did what I needed. I wasn't even in an IDE, just the Claude.ai interface in a browser. An interesting thing to note is that Claude didn't have access to my AWS resources—I didn't even give it a sample of my logs. But, still, what I told it about JSON, S3, and CloudFront was enough for it to be off to the races.
\nAnyway, after a quick review and a satisfactory dry run, I dropped it into a cronjob to grab new logs every 5 minutes. Then I pestered Claude with Grafana dashboard questions I could have figured out myself. But why read docs when you can just ask? (Which I realize is ironic, since I wrote Too long? Read anyway. but I think I make an exception for LLMs.)
\nTotal time from idea to working dashboard: about an hour.
\n![](\"attachments/2025-06-04-blog-lmorchard-graphs.png\")
\n\nNot revolutionary, but pretty satisfying for barely having to think about it.
\n", "body": "\nSince re-launching my blog, I wanted to monitor traffic and logs more closely. Nothing groundbreaking, but it had been a while since I'd run Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki on my own hardware.\n\nTurns out there's [this handy all-in-one docker-compose setup that runs on Synology NAS](https://github.com/ddiiwoong/synology-prometheus). It fired up with minimal fuss, and soon I had metrics machinery humming in my basement—except the package didn't include Loki. A quick [docs consultation](https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/setup/install/docker/) got it running alongside the rest.\n\nMy blog is a static site hosted via AWS S3 and CloudFront. Both services dump logs into an S3 bucket, but I'd never bothered reading them before—and didn't want to start now. Instead, I loaded up Claude.ai and described my problem:\n\n> I want to get logs out of CloudFront. I have enabled new-style log delivery that stores gzipped JSON logs in an S3 bucket at s3://lmorchard-logs/blog.lmorchard.com/ with names like E5YXU82LZHZCM.2025-06-04-04.d024d283.gz\n> \n> Can you help me write a script for my home Loki server to download only new log files and push them into Loki?\n\nClaude stepped right up:\n\n> I'll help you create a script to process CloudFront logs and push them to Loki. Let me write a Python script that tracks processed files and handles the gzipped JSON format.\n\nAfter some vibey iteration, we [landed at this artifact](https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/9fa52759-3b21-4e5a-a854-222d1696802b):\n\n