A horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus.
Grafana Loki is a log aggregation tool designed for efficiency and massive scale. Unlike traditional log management systems that index the full text of log entries, Loki only indexes metadata (labels), similar to the Prometheus approach. This architectural choice significantly reduces storage costs and overhead, allowing engineering teams to store orders of magnitude more logs for the same budget. In the 2026 market landscape, Loki stands as the industry standard for cloud-native logging within Kubernetes environments. It enables a seamless transition between metrics, logs, and traces through its deep integration with the Grafana LGTM stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir). Its use of LogQL—a query language optimized for log filtering and metric generation—allows developers to treat logs as data streams, enabling the creation of dashboards that derive quantitative insights from qualitative log data. By decoupling compute from storage, Loki supports massive bursts in log volume without the performance degradation typically associated with full-text indexing engines like Elasticsearch. Whether deployed as a single binary for small projects or as a microservices-based cluster for enterprise-scale ingestion, Loki provides the high availability and multi-tenancy required for modern, distributed software architectures.
A Prometheus-inspired query language that allows filtering logs by labels and extracting metrics using functions like count_over_time.
The observability platform that combines monitoring, incident management, and status pages into a single, developer-friendly interface.
AI-powered event correlation and incident automation for hybrid IT environments.
Server-side data processing pipeline that ingests, transforms, and ships data in real-time.
The open-standard for unified metadata management, data discovery, and collaborative governance.
Verified feedback from the global deployment network.
Post queries, share implementation strategies, and help other users.
Only indexes the labels associated with a log stream rather than the log content itself.
Designed to store log chunks directly in S3, GCS, or Azure Blob Storage.
Supports X-Scope-OrgID headers to isolate data between different teams or customers on a single cluster.
Allows for pre-calculating frequently used LogQL expressions into new time series.
The 'boltdb-shipper' allows Loki to run without a dedicated NoSQL database for the index.
Real-time streaming of logs directly into Grafana dashboards using WebSockets.
DevOps teams need to correlate container crashes with specific log errors across thousands of pods.
Registry Updated:2/7/2026
Compliance requires 7 years of logs, but traditional indexing is too expensive.
A SaaS provider needs to show logs to customers without data leakage between accounts.