CheckOps home

Tools directory

G

CheckOps

Grafana Loki

Grafana Loki is an AGPL-3.0 log aggregation system, "like Prometheus, but for logs", that indexes labels rather than full text to keep costs low.

Visit website

Latest public signals

Not refreshed yet. Refresh reads the public site and, when the entry has a GitHub repository, the latest release.

Visit Website

Introduction

Grafana Loki is a horizontally scalable, highly available log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. It indexes only metadata labels for each log stream instead of full-text indexing, which makes it cheaper to run, and it is queried with LogQL from Grafana.

The source code is at grafana/loki on GitHub under the AGPL-3.0 licence, with about 29,100 stars; the most recent commit was on 11 November 2026.

Features

  1. Label-based indexing: Low storage and operational cost.
  2. LogQL: Query and aggregate logs.
  3. Object storage: Stores chunks in object storage.
  4. Grafana integration: Logs next to metrics and traces.
  5. Agents: Ingest via Grafana Alloy, Fluent Bit, Vector and others.

Pros

  1. Free to use: Open source under AGPL-3.0.
  2. Maintained: Commits as recent as 11 November 2026.
  3. Community: About 29,100 GitHub stars.

Cons

  1. No full-text index: Searches on unindexed content can be slower.
  2. AGPL licence: Check obligations.

Deploy Loki with Helm or Docker Compose, ship logs with an agent such as Grafana Alloy or Fluent Bit, and query in Grafana:

{app="checkout"} |= "error"

Resources:

Pricing

Grafana Loki is free and open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence.

  1. Grafana users wanting cost-efficient logs.
  2. Kubernetes teams with label-rich logs.
  3. Not a fit for heavy full-text search workloads.

Conclusion

Loki is the Prometheus-style, cost-efficient choice for logs.

Alternatives

Other tools on CheckOps that cover similar ground. Open a page, or compare one with Grafana Loki side by side.