{"slug": "loki", "name": "Loki", "category": "observability", "category_name": "Monitoring and analytics", "description": "", "recommenders": 3, "commenters": 8, "warners": 2, "score": 1.665, "rising": 0.35, "first": "2026-01-15", "latest": "2026-10-08", "why": "we use Grafana + Loki + ClickHouse and it's been mostly maintenance-free for years. Costs under $100/month.", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 3, "compare": 0, "warn": 2}, "spark": [0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "we use Grafana + Loki + ClickHouse and it's been mostly maintenance-free for years. Costs under $100/month.", "icon": true, "domain": null, "github_repo": "github.com/grafana/loki", "official_url": "https://grafana.com/oss/loki/", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Loki"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 790428833, "item_id": 49401802, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49401802", "by": "losingthefight", "date": "2026-08-22", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "OSS LGTM/P works good for me.", "excerpt": "I run OSS Grafana with Loki, Prometheus, and Tempo. I use an Alloy sidecar taking in OTEL and scraping logs.feom my Go services and selfhost the stack. Once you need to scale it gets a bit more complicated but it's all still OSS. The biggest challenge I have is that each data source needs it's own query language, which DD and the like don't. That's why at my day job they went with DD despite the costs. Still OTEL but", "context": "", "use_case": "log storage", "switched_from": "", "story": "OTel isn\u2019t going well"}, {"id": 767336053, "item_id": 47958503, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958503", "by": "faangguyindia", "date": "2026-04-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "just using simple scripts + graphana + prometheus + Loki and for alloy/nodeexporter", "excerpt": "These days I just use a few languages: 1. Go, when I first saw code I wrote almost a decade ago still compiles and runs in Go, I decided to use Go for everything. There were some initial troubles when I started using it a decade ago, but now it's painless. 2. Haskell, I use it for DSL and state machines. 3. Bash for all deployment scripts and everything. 4. TypeScript, well for the frontend. Lately, I\u2019ve been using G", "context": "", "use_case": "logs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Functional Programmers need to take a look at Zig"}, {"id": 746096978, "item_id": 46631061, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46631061", "by": "physicles", "date": "2026-01-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "we use Grafana + Loki + ClickHouse and it's been mostly maintenance-free for years. Costs under $100/month.", "excerpt": "I can't get over how expensive these observability platforms are. Last I looked (and looked again just now), if we were to take all our structured logs from all services and send them to Datadog with our current retention policy, it would just about double our current IT spend. Instead, we use Grafana + Loki + ClickHouse and it's been mostly maintenance-free for years. Costs under $100/month. What am I missing? What'", "context": "", "use_case": "log storage", "switched_from": "", "story": "I built Vector. Now I'm answering the question your observability vendor won't"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 789138112, "item_id": 49321132, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49321132", "by": "mikgp", "date": "2026-08-16", "stance": "warn", "quote": "We use Loki for logging at work.  There\u2019s certain types of queries it just doesn\u2019t support.", "excerpt": "I think SWE fundamentals matter - because it will be a long time before software is a closed system. And the problem is that as long as humans are in the loop building software that dynamic will have to be maintained. We use Loki for logging at work. There\u2019s certain types of queries it just doesn\u2019t support. And so the question becomes - Do you change logging providers Adapt to Loki\u2019s capabilities Create a third layer", "context": "", "use_case": "logging", "switched_from": "", "story": "Software Engineering fundamentals matter more"}, {"id": 777714785, "item_id": 48607174, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48607174", "by": "jaysh", "date": "2026-06-20", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Loki always felt like a mistake to me.", "excerpt": "Off the top of my head: - substantially better performance on the same hardware, even moreso for larger range queries (multiple days) - no new query language to learn - significantly more expressive as you said - agents for scraping logs use way less CPU (I used to use grafana-agent which used about 80%, vector uses sub 5%) - very intuitive to manage TTLs - I can keep some logs for 10 years, and some for 1 week based", "context": "", "use_case": "log storage", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ten years of ClickHouse in open source"}]}], "who": [{"by": "justsomehuman", "context": "self-hosts on a Hetzner CAX31", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50013881", "date": "2026-10-08"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["log storage", "log aggregation", "logging", "logs"], "compared": [{"slug": "grafana", "name": "Grafana", "co": 5, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "clickhouse", "name": "ClickHouse", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "alloy", "name": "Alloy", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "prometheus", "name": "Prometheus", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "docker", "name": "Docker", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "datadog", "name": "Datadog", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [{"id": 788257104, "item_id": 49266069, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49266069", "by": "tracerbulletx", "date": "2026-08-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "my media server is mostly AI written go at this point and it works great", "excerpt": "Agreed, my media server is mostly AI written go at this point and it works great. Before AI the \"one way to do something\" was already my favorite feature of go, now it makes it much easier for me to use AI and still understand my own project. https://github.com/SteveCastle/loki", "context": "", "use_case": "media server", "switched_from": "", "story": "Why Go Is an Ideal Language for AI-Assisted Software Engineering"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49985548", "title": "Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49391553", "title": "OTel isn\u2019t going well", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49314902", "title": "Software Engineering fundamentals matter more", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49261133", "title": "Why Go Is an Ideal Language for AI-Assisted Software Engineering", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49209921", "title": "The web server deployment model breaks at hobby scale", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48806640", "title": "I built an out-of-the-box self-hosting infrastructure. How can I improve it?", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {"warn": 1}, "2026-07": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-08": {"neutral": 1, "warn": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {"neutral": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 800222109, "item_id": 50013881, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50013881", "by": "justsomehuman", "date": "2026-10-08", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I run the following services / apps.", "excerpt": "Not quite as cheap as $5 but I've been running at Hetzner CAX31 for a couple of years now and I run the following services / apps. Actual Budget - https://github.com/actualbudget/actual AirTrail - https://github.com/johanohly/AirTrail Beszel - https://github.com/henrygd/beszel Coder - https://github.com/coder/coder Crowdsec - https://github.com/crowdsecurity/crowdsec Dawarich - https://github.com/Freika/dawarich Dozz", "context": "self-hosts on a Hetzner CAX31", "use_case": "log aggregation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?"}, {"id": 790428833, "item_id": 49401802, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49401802", "by": "losingthefight", "date": "2026-08-22", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "OSS LGTM/P works good for me.", "excerpt": "I run OSS Grafana with Loki, Prometheus, and Tempo. I use an Alloy sidecar taking in OTEL and scraping logs.feom my Go services and selfhost the stack. Once you need to scale it gets a bit more complicated but it's all still OSS. The biggest challenge I have is that each data source needs it's own query language, which DD and the like don't. That's why at my day job they went with DD despite the costs. Still OTEL but", "context": "", "use_case": "log storage", "switched_from": "", "story": "OTel isn\u2019t going well"}, {"id": 789138112, "item_id": 49321132, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49321132", "by": "mikgp", "date": "2026-08-16", "stance": "warn", "quote": "We use Loki for logging at work.  There\u2019s certain types of queries it just doesn\u2019t support.", "excerpt": "I think SWE fundamentals matter - because it will be a long time before software is a closed system. And the problem is that as long as humans are in the loop building software that dynamic will have to be maintained. We use Loki for logging at work. There\u2019s certain types of queries it just doesn\u2019t support. And so the question becomes - Do you change logging providers Adapt to Loki\u2019s capabilities Create a third layer", "context": "", "use_case": "logging", "switched_from": "", "story": "Software Engineering fundamentals matter more"}, {"id": 787382948, "item_id": 49211434, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49211434", "by": "SlavikCA", "date": "2026-08-07", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "My Alloy & Loki logging system got loaded heavily.", "excerpt": "I have 5Gbps fiber at home. LAN is mostly 10Gbps. I'm hosting few hobbyist public websites. One is the library of hymns, songs, ... - mostly PDF, MP3, MIDI. OpnSense router -> Traefik -> Docker container. That Docker container runs on NAS, which is connected via 1Gbps port. Suddenly, last week I started to get over 1000 RPS. Was it scanner, parser, crawler, DDOS? I can't tell, as user agent was default Mac OS. It was", "context": "", "use_case": "logging", "switched_from": "", "story": "The web server deployment model breaks at hobby scale"}, {"id": 780906261, "item_id": 48806641, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48806641", "by": "canntstand", "date": "2026-07-06", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "a full monitoring stack (Grafana + Prometheus + Loki + Grafana Alloy, etc.)", "excerpt": "Hi everyone! I wanted to share a project I\u2019ve been working on called ServeHub-2. It\u2019s designed as an out-of-the-box solution for anyone looking for a ready-to-use, hybrid self-hosted architecture with a complete monitoring and backup system. The project is tailored for Ubuntu, Debian, and Arch Linux. GitHub Repository: https://github.com/canntstand/ServeHub-2 I completely automated the setup via Ansible, Docker conta", "context": "", "use_case": "log aggregation", "switched_from": "", "story": "I built an out-of-the-box self-hosting infrastructure. How can I improve it?"}, {"id": 777714785, "item_id": 48607174, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48607174", "by": "jaysh", "date": "2026-06-20", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Loki always felt like a mistake to me.", "excerpt": "Off the top of my head: - substantially better performance on the same hardware, even moreso for larger range queries (multiple days) - no new query language to learn - significantly more expressive as you said - agents for scraping logs use way less CPU (I used to use grafana-agent which used about 80%, vector uses sub 5%) - very intuitive to manage TTLs - I can keep some logs for 10 years, and some for 1 week based", "context": "", "use_case": "log storage", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ten years of ClickHouse in open source"}, {"id": 767336053, "item_id": 47958503, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958503", "by": "faangguyindia", "date": "2026-04-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "just using simple scripts + graphana + prometheus + Loki and for alloy/nodeexporter", "excerpt": "These days I just use a few languages: 1. Go, when I first saw code I wrote almost a decade ago still compiles and runs in Go, I decided to use Go for everything. There were some initial troubles when I started using it a decade ago, but now it's painless. 2. Haskell, I use it for DSL and state machines. 3. Bash for all deployment scripts and everything. 4. TypeScript, well for the frontend. Lately, I\u2019ve been using G", "context": "", "use_case": "logs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Functional Programmers need to take a look at Zig"}, {"id": 746096978, "item_id": 46631061, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46631061", "by": "physicles", "date": "2026-01-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "we use Grafana + Loki + ClickHouse and it's been mostly maintenance-free for years. Costs under $100/month.", "excerpt": "I can't get over how expensive these observability platforms are. Last I looked (and looked again just now), if we were to take all our structured logs from all services and send them to Datadog with our current retention policy, it would just about double our current IT spend. Instead, we use Grafana + Loki + ClickHouse and it's been mostly maintenance-free for years. Costs under $100/month. What am I missing? What'", "context": "", "use_case": "log storage", "switched_from": "", "story": "I built Vector. Now I'm answering the question your observability vendor won't"}]}