Loki is a log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. 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
- indexes and groups log streams using the same labels as Prometheus, allowing
to seamlessly switch between metrics and logs using the same labels
- has native support in Grafana
A Loki-based logging stack consists of 3 components:
- promtail is the agent, responsible for gathering logs and sending them to Loki
- loki is the main server, responsible for storing logs and processing queries
- Grafana for querying and displaying the logs
Additionally 2 other components are provided:
- logcli to run LoqQL queries against a Loki server
- loki-canary to audit the log capturing performance of Loki
