Log analytics · Grafana Labs

Grafana Loki

Open-source log aggregation system that indexes only metadata labels, designed to pair cheaply with Grafana dashboards.

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Loki is Grafana Labs' open-source log aggregation system, deliberately designed to index only a small set of labels (like Prometheus does for metrics) rather than full-text content, which keeps storage and indexing costs far lower than traditional log platforms at the cost of slower ad hoc full-text search. It is built to be run alongside Grafana and Prometheus/Mimir as one coherent observability stack, sharing the same query concepts (LogQL mirrors PromQL) and the same dashboards. It can be self-hosted for free or consumed through Grafana Cloud, which bills logs on a per-GB-processed/written/retained basis alongside a small monthly platform fee.

At a glance

Vendor Grafana Labs
Pricing model Free tier + paid plans
Free tier Yes
Deployment Cloud, Self-hosted
Open source Yes (AGPL-3.0)
Best for Teams already on Grafana/Prometheus who want cheap log storage without full-text indexing overhead.

Pricing

Free to self-host; Grafana Cloud's Pro tier charges a small platform fee plus per-GB rates for processing, writing and retaining logs.

Plan Price Notes
Free (Grafana Cloud) $0 50GB logs ingested/month, 14-day retention
Pro (Grafana Cloud) $19/month platform fee + usage $0.050/GB processed, $0.400/GB written, $0.100/GB retained; 30-day retention
Enterprise from $25,000/year custom per-GB volume pricing, custom retention

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Features

  • Label-based indexing instead of full-text indexing
  • LogQL query language aligned with PromQL
  • Native integration with Grafana dashboards and alerting
  • Multi-tenant, horizontally scalable architecture
  • Object-storage-backed retention (S3/GCS/Azure Blob)
  • Promtail/Grafana Alloy agents for log shipping

Integrations

Profile last reviewed September 21, 2026

Head to head

Alternatives

Graylog Self-hostable log management platform with a free source-available core and paid Enterprise/Security tiers billed by daily volume. OpenSearch Open-source fork of Elasticsearch/Kibana for log analytics and search, now governed under the Linux Foundation. Better Stack Developer-friendly SaaS combining log/trace analytics, uptime monitoring and incident management with transparent per-GB pricing.

Grafana Loki in the index now

Terms to know

Data observability Continuous automated monitoring of pipelines and datasets to catch freshness, volume and quality problems early. Log aggregation Collecting log data from many separate systems into one centralized, searchable store instead of checking each system individually.

Related guides

How to choose a log analytics tool Pick a log platform by who owns it, whether you index everything or only labels, and how the pricing model behaves as volume grows.