Personally, I find the OSS Grafana and Loki experience to be a bit maddening; both as an end-user and admin.
From the admin side, I usually end up deploying Loki with Helm charts in k8s clusters. This makes it difficult to tweak specific settings, especially around Loki's varying deployment models and "power-user" options. Helm also makes upgrades a bit scary without rigorous testing in staging environments that have version parity with prod across all infra tools. The same goes for Grafana, which I usually deploy alongside Prometheus, tightly-coupling that entire part of my observability stack.
As for end-user experience, Loki's storage and query model seems to be designed for log aggregation across multiple microservices with structured logging and proper tagging. But sometimes, I just want to read through application logs, and batch-querying through grafana's "explore" interface doesn't make it any easier.
What are people using for log aggregation these days? The author mentions a central syslog server, and that doesn't sound like the worst idea to me...
From the admin side, I usually end up deploying Loki with Helm charts in k8s clusters. This makes it difficult to tweak specific settings, especially around Loki's varying deployment models and "power-user" options. Helm also makes upgrades a bit scary without rigorous testing in staging environments that have version parity with prod across all infra tools. The same goes for Grafana, which I usually deploy alongside Prometheus, tightly-coupling that entire part of my observability stack.
As for end-user experience, Loki's storage and query model seems to be designed for log aggregation across multiple microservices with structured logging and proper tagging. But sometimes, I just want to read through application logs, and batch-querying through grafana's "explore" interface doesn't make it any easier.
What are people using for log aggregation these days? The author mentions a central syslog server, and that doesn't sound like the worst idea to me...