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grafana
loki
Go2018–2026
grafana / loki

loki

Like Prometheus, but for logs.

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Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
40Distinct people
48Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
29.2KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Like Prometheus, but for logs.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year48 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-12-11 19:19:57 UTC to 2026-10-08 23:27:36 UTC.

0369122018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 2 submissions, 9 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 2 submissions, 4 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 1 submissions, 4 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 1 submissions, 6 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 2 submissions, 2 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1129
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC624
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC514
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC716
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC422
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Loki: like Prometheus, but for logs. 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. It does not index the contents of the logs, but rather a set of labels for each log stream. Compared to other log aggregation systems, Loki: does not do full text indexing on logs. By storing compressed, unstructured logs and only indexing metadata, Loki is simpler to operate and cheaper to run. indexes and groups log streams using the same labels you’re already using with Prometheus, enabling you to seamlessly switch between metrics and logs using the same labels that you’re already using with Prometheus. is an especially good fit for storing Kubernetes Pod logs. Metadata such as Pod labels is automatically scraped and indexed. has native support in Grafana (needs Grafana v6.0). A Loki-based logging stack consists of 3 components: Alloy is agent, responsible for gathering logs and sending them to Loki. Loki is the main service, responsible for storing logs and processing queries. Grafana for querying and displaying the logs. Note that Alloy replaced Promtail in the stack, because Promtail is considered to be feature complete, and future development for logs collection will be in Grafana Alloy. Loki is like Prometheus, but for logs: we prefer a multidimensional label-based approach to indexing, and want a single-binary, easy to operate system with no dependencies. Loki differs from Prometheus by focusing on logs instead of metrics, and delivering logs via push, instead of pull. Getting started Installing Loki Installing Alloy Getting Started ⚠️ Helm Chart Migration Effective March 16, 2026, the Grafana Loki Helm chart will be forked to a new repository grafana-community/helm-charts. The chart in the Loki repository will continue to be maintained for GEL users only. See #20705 for details. Upgrading Upgrading Loki Documentation Latest release Upcoming release, at the tip of the main branch Commonly used sections: API documentation for getting logs into Loki. Labels Operations Docker Driver Client is a Docker plugin to send logs directly to Loki from Docker containers. LogCLI provides a command-line interface for querying logs. Loki Canary monitors your Loki installation for missing logs. Troubleshooting presents help dealing with error messages. Loki in Grafana describes how to set up a Loki datasource in Grafana. Getting Help If you have any questions or feedback regarding Loki: Search existing thread in the Grafana Labs community forum for Loki: https://community.grafana.com Ask a question on the Loki Slack channel. To invite yourself to the Grafana Slack, visit https://slack.grafana.com/ and join the #loki channel. File an issue for bugs, issues and feature suggestions. Send an email to lokiproject@googlegroups.com, or use the web interface. UI issues should be filed directly in Grafana. Your feedback is always welcome. Further Reading The original design doc for Loki is a good source for discussion of the motivation and design decisions. Callum Styan's March 2019 DevOpsDays Vancouver talk "Grafana Loki: Log Aggregation for Incident Investigations". Grafana Labs blog post "How We Designed Loki to Work Easily Both as Microservices and as Monoliths". Tom Wilkie's early-2019 CNCF Paris/FOSDEM talk "Grafana Loki: like Prometheus, but for logs" (slides, video). David Kaltschmidt's KubeCon 2018 talk "On the OSS Path to Full Observability with Grafana" (slides, video) on how Loki fits into a cloud-native environment. Goutham Veeramachaneni's blog post "Loki: Prometheus-inspired, open source logging for cloud natives" on details of the Loki architecture. David Kaltschmidt's blog post "Closer look at Grafana's user interface for Loki" on the ideas that went into the logging user interface. Contributing Refer to CONTRIBUTING.md Building from source Loki can be run in a single host, no-dependencies mode using the following commands. You need an up-to-date version of Go, we recommend using the version found in our Makefile # Checkout source code $ git clone https://github.com/grafana/loki $ cd loki # Build binary $ go build ./cmd/loki # Run executable $ ./loki -config.file=./cmd/loki/loki-local-config.yaml Alternatively, on Unix systems you can use make to build the binary, which adds additional arguments to the go build command. # Build binary $ make loki # Run executable $ ./cmd/loki/loki -config.file=./cmd/loki/loki-local-config.yaml To run multiple Loki tenants locally, ensure that auth_enabled is set to true and provide a runtime config with any tenant specific overrides. # Build binary $ make loki # Run executable ./loki -config.file=./cmd/loki/loki-local-multi-tenant-config.yaml -runtime-config.file=./cmd/loki/loki-overrides.yaml Adopters Please see ADOPTERS.md for some of the organizations using Loki today. If you would like to add your organization to the list, please open a PR to add it to the list. License Grafana Loki is distributed under AGPL-3.0-only. For Apache-2.0 exceptions, see LICENSING.md.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

48 sources
justsomehuman·Oct 8, 2026
Not quite as cheap as $5 but I've been running at Hetzner CAX31 for a couple of years now and I run the following services / apps. Actual Budget - https://github.com/actualbudget/actual AirTrail - https://github.com/johanohly/AirTrail Beszel - https://github.com/henrygd/beszel Coder - https://github.com/coder/coder Crowdsec - https://github.com/crowdsecurity/crowdsec Dawarich - https://github.com/Freika/dawarich Dozzle - https://github.com/amir20/dozzle Forgejo - https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo Forgejo runner - https://code.forgejo.org/forgejo/runner Grafana - https://github.com/grafana/grafana Immich - https://github.com/immich-app/immich Karakeeo - https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep KitchenOwl - https://github.com/tombursch/kitchen owl Loki - https://github.com/grafana/loki Matrix - Tuwunel (https://github.com/matrix-construc
Read the rest
t/tuwunel) and cinny (https://github.com/cinnyapp/cinny) memos - https://github.com/usememos/memos Nourish - https://github.com/norish-recipes/norish ntfy - https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy oauth2-proxy - https://github.com/oauth2-proxy/oauth2-proxy Outline - https://github.com/outline/outline Paperless-ngx - https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx Pingvin Share- https://github.com/stonith404/pingvin-share Pixelfed - https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed Pocket ID - https://github.com/pocket-id/pocket-id Reitti - https://github.com/dedicatedcode/reitti Signal CLI rest API - https://github.com/bbernhard/signal-cli-rest-api Slink - https://github.com/andrii-kryvoviaz/slink Ghost - personal music blog Traefik - https://github.com/traefik/traefik Umami - https://github.com/umami-software/umami Uptime Kuma - https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma Vikunja - https://github.com/go-vikunja/vikunja wg-easy - https://github.com/wg-easy/wg-easy ZeroByte - https://github.com/nicotsx/zerobyte I used to run a couple of Hugo blogs but I've ended up moving them to bunny.
In Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?
sandstrom·Jul 23, 2025
"What are your main use cases for search or log indexing?" To me, storing and searching logs is quite different from most other search use-cases, and it's not obvious that they should be handled by the same piece of software. For example, tokenization, stemming, language support many other things and are basically useless in log search. Also, log search is often storing a lot of data, and rarely retrieving it (different usage pattern from many search use-cases which tend to be less write-heavy and more about reads). I know ElasticSearch has had success in both, but if I were Manticore/Typesense/Meilisearch I'd probably just skip logs altogether. Loki, QuickWit and other such tools are likely better suited for logs. - https://github.com/quickwit-oss/quickwit - https://github.com/grafana/loki
In Manticore Search: Fast, efficient, drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch
sandstrom·Apr 8, 2024
Key features mentioned in the release notes are: - Bloom filters for queries ('needle in haystack' problem) - Native OpenTelemetry support - Updated helm charts - Lambda/Promtail support dropping labels - Docs improvements Personally, I'm thrilled that the problem with high-cardinality labels will [hopefully] get addressed after 6 years (that's the top item, with bloom filters). The architecture Loki has chosen is great for keeping costs down and using simple blob-storage (S3) for data. However, it makes it hard to quickly query unique keys such as trace IDs or user IDs. But bloom filters will hopefully will do the job. I raised the needle in haystack problem back in 2018, so it's great to see this landing: https://github.com/grafana/loki/issues/91 For anyone that's curious, bloom filters is a clever technique: https
Read the rest
://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_filter
In Loki 3.0 Released
buro9·Apr 28, 2023
Loki docs are here: https://github.com/grafana/loki/tree/main/docs/sources they are OSS. The last contributor to the docs was an hour ago (at time of writing this comment) and came from a maintainer not employed by Grafana Labs. Looking down the recent commits I see lots of activities from non-Grafana employees that have been accepted. If there are specific issues with contributing docs or code please do point me towards them.
In I can't recommend serious use of an all-in-one local Grafana Loki setup
oriettaxx·Dec 5, 2022
welcome to the club My advice: * hire a professional to have a good look at costs: you'll be "amazed" on how much $$ are wasted: a 15 days contract is more then enough: you can even tell him/her: we pay you exactly the amount of $$ you make us save in a month... I think plenty of professionals will agree on that contract without even have a pre look at your AWS bill hahaha (I would!) I did it recently on my customer bill: more then 45% of pure waste! some examples: * Loki/DynamoDB: uhhh, scary: the defaults for hosting in AWS imply more then 500$ per months https://github.com/grafana/loki/issues/2801 (so be aware of 'experiments' or quick installations) * EFS (aka NFS): you pay by space... and.. .there is no limits! we had a backup that was not rotating and wasted (aka paid!) for almost 1Tera (this could not happend in the past for a
Read the rest
warning 'disk full' coming from your sysadmin) * volumes nobody removes (and useless volumes that proliferates when you have autoscaling on) * Cloudwatch metrics that starts to be cheap then become pretty expensive (be aware that metrics of EC2 instances stays, so you pay for it, for 1 year even if instances are terminated!) * esperiment in AWS kinesis by an intern left there (with a drain of $$) Please note, aws gives you plenty of notices and documentations on everything, there are no trick from their side at all: the problem is the whole "cloud" and pay per use payment structure that made a revolution on who is checking the usage (so the bill), and orgs are just not prepared. You all will agree AWS has all the metrics to see how customers just waste $$$: they of course cannot understand if the data in EFS is useless or not, but on the majority of services they sure can... and I think they also have clear statistics that tell them the $$ that they are making just by having users not taking care: and this amount I think is soooo huge that they can even afford to tell you (in the 'trusted adviser'... that, btw, you only have with the highest cost of support) I hope your post will push users to be more conscious on how they spend their money A final word to all non US customers of AWS: are you aware of the huge amount your country is just giving away? EU wake up!
In AWS Billing Issue
tomalaci·Oct 25, 2022
Looks good but have they finally added TLS between Promtail and Loki? If so, is there a good documentation about it? In some environments where I need to put promtail on external probes I was surprised to learn that you couldn't establish TLS between promtail and a loki server. I had to instead setup nginx proxies between the external probe and our internal cluster. This was a year or so ago. Original issue about it was: https://github.com/grafana/loki/issues/475 (looking at last comments, seems like people are still having issues to easily set it up)
In How to autoscale Grafana Loki queries using KEDA

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