Grafana Loki
Grafana Loki is a horizontally scalable, highly available log aggregation system designed to be cost-effective and easy to operate. It indexes only metadata (labels) and stores log content in compressed chunks, making it efficient for querying logs alongside metrics in Grafana. It is part of the Grafana Labs ecosystem and integrates seamlessly with Prometheus for a unified observability experience.
Developers should use Loki when they need a lightweight, scalable log aggregation solution that complements Prometheus metrics, especially in cloud-native or Kubernetes environments. It is ideal for centralized logging where cost efficiency and fast querying of logs correlated with metrics are priorities, such as in microservices architectures or large-scale distributed systems.