[fishpen0]

I go hilariously out of my way to eliminate elasticsearch at any org I join. Usually because it's only being used for logs and modern tools like loki are immeasurably easier to scale and cheaper to run. But I also find many many developers using it don't know about time series databases or anything at all about which data structures go in which kind of database and just dump everything into a horrifically organized search database. Its at least one order of magnitude worse to scale and operate than a mongo-type nosql database being used incorrectly by a developer who doesn't know any better and two orders of magnitude worse than a sql database being used incorrectly by a developer who doesn't know any better.

[jturpin]

Loki's fine if you are very cost sensitive and are comfortable with Prometheus, but it's not really a replacement for a text-search database like Elasticsearch. It also scales about the same, both being horizontally scalable (I'm not sure what Loki's sharding strategy is). Our ELK stack runs on 3 2cpu/8gb ram nodes totaling about $160 a month and can handle 50+ million of records or so (I haven't ran it to its absolute limit). This is a comfortable price to performance ratio for us and I imagine many other companies.