|
|
|
|
|
|
by tdubey
517 days ago
|
|
|
Loki by Grafana Labs is nice (https://grafana.com/oss/loki/). There was a time (3+ years ago) where the product was changing pretty rapidly and much of the documentation was on git, so we had a few headaches doing minor version bumps, but I believe its much more mature now. |
|
|
- It is non-trivial to setup and operate. It requires properly configuring and orchestrating numerous components - distributor, ingestor, querier, query frontend, compactor, consul, ruler, memcache, index service, etc. - see https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/get-started/architectur...
- Its' configs tend to break with every new release, since some configs become obsolete and some configs change names and/or structure.
- It is very slow on "needle in the haystack" queries such as "search for logs containing some rarely seen trace_id", since it needs to read, unpack and scan all the logs at object storage. This may be also very expensive if the object storage service charges for read IO.
- It doesn't support log fields with big number of unique values (aka high-cardinality log fields). It you'll try storing logs with high-cardinality fields into Loki, then it will quickly explode with enormous RAM usage. Recent Loki releases provide half-baked solution for this problem - "structured metadata" ( https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/get-started/labels/stru... ), but it is still experimental and requires non-trivial configs (aka it doesn't work).