Grafana Loki
Horizontally scalable log aggregation system designed to work with Grafana
Overview
Grafana Loki is an open-source log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. Unlike Elasticsearch, it indexes only metadata labels rather than full log content, making it dramatically cheaper to operate at scale. Promtail or the OpenTelemetry Collector ships logs to Loki, and Grafana queries them with LogQL for correlated log-and-metrics dashboards.
Where it falls short of Datadog
- Full-text search is not supported; only label-based log filtering
- Requires Grafana for a usable query UI (no standalone dashboard)
- Scalable distributed mode requires object storage (S3/GCS) and careful tuning
We list the gaps honestly so you can decide if the trade-off is worth owning your data.
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