[sofixa]

"it's just a difference of cd-ing to the correct folder for the date/server" to be able to cat/grep.

You have to connect to your server, get to the correct folder, and then run the cats and greps which are easy (if you have to do some more advanced filtering with awk it gets more complicated.)

Connecting to Grafana and running a simple label query is practically the same in terms of complexity and time, but with vastly more features available.

> Will whatever today's favoured log query/filter/etc be around in 25 years? Last time I looked at this people were going on about logstash and elasticsearch. Nobody could show me how to to the above command without touching the mouse.

You can run ElasticSearch queries via the API, and can still do it today. I don't know about, but Loki is a statically compiled binary with only optional external dependencies. You'd still be able to run it in 25 year just fine.