About
Overview
Grafana Loki is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. It is designed to be very cost-effective and easy to operate because it does not index the contents of the logs, but rather a set of labels for each log stream.
Pricing & Free Tier
Free Tier: Yes. The open-source version is free to self-host.
Grafana Cloud: Free tier includes 50GB of logs and 3 users. Paid plans scale based on data volume.
How to Use
- Deploy Loki and Promtail (the log collector) on your server.
- Configure Promtail to read your log files.
- Add Loki as a data source in Grafana.
- Use LogQL (Loki's query language) to search and filter your logs.
Important Notes
- Cost-Effective: Because Loki only indexes metadata (labels), it is significantly cheaper to run at scale than full-text indexed log systems like Elasticsearch.
- LogQL: The query language is powerful but different from SQL. It takes time to learn.