What is Loki?
Grafana's horizontally scalable log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus.
Grafana Loki is a log aggregation system designed to be cost-effective and easy to operate. Unlike Elasticsearch, Loki only indexes log labels (not log content), making storage much cheaper. Logs are compressed and stored in object storage (S3). Promtail (or OpenTelemetry Collector) ships logs to Loki. Logs are queried using LogQL, a query language similar to PromQL. Loki integrates natively with Grafana for unified metrics + logs dashboards.
Deep Dive Guide
grafana loki log aggregation guide
Related Terms
More Monitoring Terms
AlertManager
Prometheus component that handles alert routing, grouping, and notification delivery.
Error Budget
The acceptable amount of downtime or errors before an SLO is breached.
Grafana
An open-source analytics and visualization platform for metrics, logs, and traces.
Observability
The ability to understand the internal state of a system from its external outputs.
OpenTelemetry
An open-source observability framework for generating metrics, logs, and traces.
Prometheus
An open-source monitoring system that scrapes and stores time-series metrics.
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