Loki

Judgement

What it is

Complete system

What it does

A log aggregation system that indexes only labels and stores log content cheaply in object storage, queried from Grafana with LogQL.

Adopt it when

You already use Prometheus and Grafana and want low-cost centralised logs.

Watch out

Full-text search over unindexed content is slow at scale, and running it distributed is complex.

Ready for

Production-ready

Runs as

Self-hosted server and cloud service

Built with

Go

How established

Established: started 8 years ago, latest release v3.7.9.

What the license allows

Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.

Judged on 2026-11-03 from the project's README and GitHub data. The license and age lines are worked out directly.

Compare Loki

Built from

Follow it down: Loki → Go → runs on a microchip

How compilers were built, back to punched paper tape

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