A look at Grafana Loki
Grafana Loki is essentially a toolkit to handle logs coming from systems and applications. It’s designed to gather and organize log information in a way that’s easy to use and efficient to store. Here’s how it works from a high-level standpoint:
- Collection and indexing: Loki collects log data and indexes labels associated with log streams, such as application name or environment—similar to how Prometheus handles its data. These labels act as a quick-reference index, eliminating the need to search through the entire text of the logs.
- Storage: The actual log messages are compressed and stored in chunks –compact pieces of data. These chunks can be kept in various storage solutions, including cloud services such as Amazon S3 or Google GCS, or on local servers. By compressing the logs and keeping the index minimal, Loki ensures compact storage use, reducing both resource consumption and costs.
- Querying: Loki’...