In simple English
When running servers or apps, things break and print text messages called logs. Reading these files on every server by hand takes too much time. This tool gathers all those messages into one central place. It saves money because it does not index every word inside every log. Instead, it indexes small tags like app names or error codes, just like Prometheus (a tool for collecting numbers from servers).
What it is
Loki is a log aggregation system that collects log streams and groups them by metadata labels. It works closely with Grafana (a tool for making visual charts of server data) so you can search and read your logs in one dashboard.
What it is good for
Developers and solo builders who run apps on virtual servers or Kubernetes and need to search through server logs without paying high costs for heavy database storage.
- Much cheaper to run than traditional log search engines because it skips full text indexing.
- Uses the same label system as Prometheus so your metrics and logs match up.
- Runs as a single binary on a local machine for easy testing.
- Uses the AGPL-3.0 licence which has strict rules if you offer this software as a hosted service to others.
- Requires a separate log collector agent like Grafana Alloy to ship logs into it.
- Finding text inside logs is slower than in tools that index every single word.
grep across raw log files on servers
Grafana
- elastic/elasticsearch78k stars
Indexes every word in your logs for fast search, but uses much more memory and storage.
- openobserve/openobserve22k stars
An open source log and metrics platform designed to be lightweight and easy to run.
- slok/sloth2.6k stars
Generates Prometheus alerting and recording rules from a short specification of a service level objective.
- nicolargo/glances34k stars
A live view of one computer's health, in a terminal, in a browser, or through an AI assistant.
- dokku/dokku32k stars
A small platform you install on one server, which builds and runs an app every time you push code to it.
git clone https://github.com/grafana/loki cd loki go build ./cmd/loki ./loki -config.file=./cmd/loki/loki-local-config.yaml