Alternatives to Loki logo

Alternatives to Loki

Elasticsearch, ELK, Prometheus, Log4j, and Bunyan are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Loki.
370
314
+ 1
17

What is Loki and what are its top alternatives?

Loki is a horizontally-scalable, highly-available, multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. It is designed to be very cost effective and easy to operate, as it does not index the contents of the logs, but rather a set of labels for each log stream.
Loki is a tool in the Logging Tools category of a tech stack.
Loki is an open source tool with 21.8K GitHub stars and 3.2K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Loki's open source repository on GitHub

Top Alternatives to Loki

  • Elasticsearch
    Elasticsearch

    Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine capable of storing data and searching it in near real time. Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats and Logstash are the Elastic Stack (sometimes called the ELK Stack). ...

  • ELK
    ELK

    It is the acronym for three open source projects: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Elasticsearch is a search and analytics engine. Logstash is a server‑side data processing pipeline that ingests data from multiple sources simultaneously, transforms it, and then sends it to a "stash" like Elasticsearch. Kibana lets users visualize data with charts and graphs in Elasticsearch. ...

  • Prometheus
    Prometheus

    Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true. ...

  • Log4j
    Log4j

    It is an open source logging framework. With this tool – logging behavior can be controlled by editing a configuration file only without touching the application binary and can be used to store the Selenium Automation flow logs. ...

  • Castle Core
    Castle Core

    It provides common Castle Project abstractions including logging services. It also features Castle DynamicProxy a lightweight runtime proxy generator, and Castle DictionaryAdapter. ...

  • Bunyan
    Bunyan

    It is a simple and fast JSON logging module for node.js services. It has extensible streams system for controlling where log records go (to a stream, to a file, log file rotation, etc.) ...

  • Seq
    Seq

    Seq is a self-hosted server for structured log search, analysis, and alerting. It can be hosted on Windows or Linux/Docker, and has integrations for most popular structured logging libraries. ...

  • Fluent Bit
    Fluent Bit

    It is a super fast, lightweight, and highly scalable logging and metrics processor and forwarder. It is the preferred choice for cloud and containerized environments. ...

Loki alternatives & related posts

Elasticsearch logo

Elasticsearch

34.7K
26.4K
1.6K
Open Source, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine
34.7K
26.4K
+ 1
1.6K
PROS OF ELASTICSEARCH
  • 326
    Powerful api
  • 315
    Great search engine
  • 230
    Open source
  • 214
    Restful
  • 199
    Near real-time search
  • 97
    Free
  • 84
    Search everything
  • 54
    Easy to get started
  • 45
    Analytics
  • 26
    Distributed
  • 6
    Fast search
  • 5
    More than a search engine
  • 3
    Highly Available
  • 3
    Awesome, great tool
  • 3
    Great docs
  • 3
    Easy to scale
  • 2
    Fast
  • 2
    Easy setup
  • 2
    Great customer support
  • 2
    Intuitive API
  • 2
    Great piece of software
  • 2
    Reliable
  • 2
    Potato
  • 2
    Nosql DB
  • 2
    Document Store
  • 1
    Not stable
  • 1
    Scalability
  • 1
    Open
  • 1
    Github
  • 1
    Elaticsearch
  • 1
    Actively developing
  • 1
    Responsive maintainers on GitHub
  • 1
    Ecosystem
  • 1
    Easy to get hot data
  • 0
    Community
CONS OF ELASTICSEARCH
  • 7
    Resource hungry
  • 6
    Diffecult to get started
  • 5
    Expensive
  • 4
    Hard to keep stable at large scale

related Elasticsearch posts

Tim Abbott

We've been using PostgreSQL since the very early days of Zulip, but we actually didn't use it from the beginning. Zulip started out as a MySQL project back in 2012, because we'd heard it was a good choice for a startup with a wide community. However, we found that even though we were using the Django ORM for most of our database access, we spent a lot of time fighting with MySQL. Issues ranged from bad collation defaults, to bad query plans which required a lot of manual query tweaks.

We ended up getting so frustrated that we tried out PostgresQL, and the results were fantastic. We didn't have to do any real customization (just some tuning settings for how big a server we had), and all of our most important queries were faster out of the box. As a result, we were able to delete a bunch of custom queries escaping the ORM that we'd written to make the MySQL query planner happy (because postgres just did the right thing automatically).

And then after that, we've just gotten a ton of value out of postgres. We use its excellent built-in full-text search, which has helped us avoid needing to bring in a tool like Elasticsearch, and we've really enjoyed features like its partial indexes, which saved us a lot of work adding unnecessary extra tables to get good performance for things like our "unread messages" and "starred messages" indexes.

I can't recommend it highly enough.

See more
Tymoteusz Paul
Devops guy at X20X Development LTD · | 23 upvotes · 8M views

Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).

It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up or vagrant reload we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.

I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.

We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.

If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.

The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).

Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.

See more
ELK logo

ELK

843
919
21
The acronym for three open source projects: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana
843
919
+ 1
21
PROS OF ELK
  • 13
    Open source
  • 3
    Can run locally
  • 3
    Good for startups with monetary limitations
  • 1
    External Network Goes Down You Aren't Without Logging
  • 1
    Easy to setup
  • 0
    Json log supprt
  • 0
    Live logging
CONS OF ELK
  • 5
    Elastic Search is a resource hog
  • 3
    Logstash configuration is a pain
  • 1
    Bad for startups with personal limitations

related ELK posts

Wallace Alves
Cyber Security Analyst · | 2 upvotes · 855.1K views

Docker Docker Compose Portainer ELK Elasticsearch Kibana Logstash nginx

See more
Prometheus logo

Prometheus

4.5K
3.7K
239
An open-source service monitoring system and time series database, developed by SoundCloud
4.5K
3.7K
+ 1
239
PROS OF PROMETHEUS
  • 47
    Powerful easy to use monitoring
  • 38
    Flexible query language
  • 32
    Dimensional data model
  • 27
    Alerts
  • 23
    Active and responsive community
  • 22
    Extensive integrations
  • 19
    Easy to setup
  • 12
    Beautiful Model and Query language
  • 7
    Easy to extend
  • 6
    Nice
  • 3
    Written in Go
  • 2
    Good for experimentation
  • 1
    Easy for monitoring
CONS OF PROMETHEUS
  • 12
    Just for metrics
  • 6
    Bad UI
  • 6
    Needs monitoring to access metrics endpoints
  • 4
    Not easy to configure and use
  • 3
    Supports only active agents
  • 2
    Written in Go
  • 2
    TLS is quite difficult to understand
  • 2
    Requires multiple applications and tools
  • 1
    Single point of failure

related Prometheus posts

Conor Myhrvold
Tech Brand Mgr, Office of CTO at Uber · | 15 upvotes · 4.4M views

Why we spent several years building an open source, large-scale metrics alerting system, M3, built for Prometheus:

By late 2014, all services, infrastructure, and servers at Uber emitted metrics to a Graphite stack that stored them using the Whisper file format in a sharded Carbon cluster. We used Grafana for dashboarding and Nagios for alerting, issuing Graphite threshold checks via source-controlled scripts. While this worked for a while, expanding the Carbon cluster required a manual resharding process and, due to lack of replication, any single node’s disk failure caused permanent loss of its associated metrics. In short, this solution was not able to meet our needs as the company continued to grow.

To ensure the scalability of Uber’s metrics backend, we decided to build out a system that provided fault tolerant metrics ingestion, storage, and querying as a managed platform...

https://eng.uber.com/m3/

(GitHub : https://github.com/m3db/m3)

See more
Matt Menzenski
Senior Software Engineering Manager at PayIt · | 15 upvotes · 985.8K views

Grafana and Prometheus together, running on Kubernetes , is a powerful combination. These tools are cloud-native and offer a large community and easy integrations. At PayIt we're using exporting Java application metrics using a Dropwizard metrics exporter, and our Node.js services now use the prom-client npm library to serve metrics.

See more
Log4j logo

Log4j

3.1K
99
0
A Java-based logging utility
3.1K
99
+ 1
0
PROS OF LOG4J
    Be the first to leave a pro
    CONS OF LOG4J
      Be the first to leave a con

      related Log4j posts

      Castle Core logo

      Castle Core

      559
      3
      0
      It provides common Castle Project abstractions including logging services
      559
      3
      + 1
      0
      PROS OF CASTLE CORE
        Be the first to leave a pro
        CONS OF CASTLE CORE
          Be the first to leave a con

          related Castle Core posts

          Bunyan logo

          Bunyan

          311
          15
          0
          A logging module for node.js services
          311
          15
          + 1
          0
          PROS OF BUNYAN
            Be the first to leave a pro
            CONS OF BUNYAN
              Be the first to leave a con

              related Bunyan posts

              Seq logo

              Seq

              113
              140
              19
              Log search, analysis, and alerting server built for modern structured log data
              113
              140
              + 1
              19
              PROS OF SEQ
              • 5
                Easy to install and configure
              • 5
                Easy to use
              • 3
                Flexible query language
              • 2
                Free unlimited one-person version
              • 2
                Beautiful charts and dashboards
              • 2
                Extensive plug-ins and integrations
              CONS OF SEQ
              • 1
                It is not free

              related Seq posts

              Fluent Bit logo

              Fluent Bit

              64
              24
              0
              Fast and lightweight Logs and Metrics processor
              64
              24
              + 1
              0
              PROS OF FLUENT BIT
                Be the first to leave a pro
                CONS OF FLUENT BIT
                  Be the first to leave a con

                  related Fluent Bit posts