Loki: horizontally scalable log aggregation inspired by Prometheus
The Grafana Loki repository: a log store that indexes labels instead of full text, queried with LogQL from Grafana or logcli, with the single-binary mode for one host and the microservices mode for clusters.
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grafana/loki
- Stars
- 29k
- Forks
- 4.1k
- Language
- Go
- Licence
- AGPL-3.0
- Last push
- 15 Oct 2026
On GitHub: Like Prometheus, but for logs.
Open on GitHubGrafana Loki (about 29,000 stars on GitHub) is developed by Grafana Labs and contributors under the AGPL-3.0 license. Unlike Elasticsearch-style systems it does not index the content of log lines; it indexes a small set of labels per stream and stores the compressed lines as chunks on local disk or object storage. That design makes it cheap to run and operate, at the price of slower full-text searches over very long time ranges.
Choose Loki when you already run Prometheus and Grafana: the labels match the ones on your metrics, so you can jump from a spike on a graph to the log lines of the same host and service in one click. The repository also contains logcli, the command-line client, and Promtail, the original agent, which has been superseded by Grafana Alloy for new deployments.
Try it with Docker, either on its own or with the compose stack from Loki: ship and search logs:
docker run -d --name loki -p 3100:3100 grafana/loki:latest
curl -s http://localhost:3100/ready
curl -s -G http://localhost:3100/loki/api/v1/query --data-urlencode 'query={job="varlog"}' --data-urlencode 'limit=5'The production/ and examples/ directories in the repository hold reference configurations for Docker Compose and Kubernetes, and the docs/ tree is the source of grafana.com/docs/loki. Retention is off by default; configure the compactor with retention_enabled: true and a retention_period before the disk fills. Careful: once retention is enabled, chunks older than the period are deleted permanently. Credit to Grafana Labs and the Loki contributors.
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See also
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- 0323 Fix: Failed to start service, how to read systemctl status and journalctl Job for x.service failed tells you only that the service did not start. The real reason is in systemctl status and journalctl… Beginner · Fixes an error · Linux Article Logs · Services & systemd 15 Oct 2026
- 0371 Where are the logs? journalctl, /var/log and container logs A practical map of where Linux programs write their logs and the commands to read them: journalctl filters, the classic files under… Beginner · Step by step · Linux Article Logs 15 Oct 2026
- 0373 Loki: ship and search logs Run Loki, Grafana Alloy and Grafana with Docker Compose, collect the systemd journal and /var/log files with a short Alloy configuration, and… Intermediate · Step by step · Linux Article Logs 15 Oct 2026
- 0432 Try Sigma rules against your own logs Install the sigma-cli converter, take a rule from the public SigmaHQ library, convert it into a query for a log tool you… Intermediate · Step by step · Linux, macOS Article Logs · Security resources & detection 15 Oct 2026
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- Dominik +1,596 chars