Grafana Loki Has a Free API — Log Aggregation Without the Cost

Grafana Loki is a log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. It indexes labels, not content — making it 10x cheaper than Elasticsearch for logs.

What Is Loki?

Loki stores logs efficiently by only indexing metadata (labels) while keeping log lines compressed in object storage. Query with LogQL.

Why Loki?

• 10x cheaper than Elasticsearch
• Native Grafana integration
• Prometheus-like label model
• S3/GCS/MinIO storage
• Multi-tenant

Quick Start

docker run -p 3100:3100 grafana/loki:latest

HTTP API

# Push logs
curl -X POST http://localhost:3100/loki/api/v1/push \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"streams":[{"stream":{"app":"myapp","level":"error"},"values":[["1679500000000000000","Connection refused to database"]]}]}'

# Query logs
curl -G http://localhost:3100/loki/api/v1/query_range \
  --data-urlencode "query={app=\"myapp\"}" \
  --data-urlencode "limit=10"

# Query with filter
curl -G http://localhost:3100/loki/api/v1/query_range \
  --data-urlencode "query={app=\"myapp\"} |= \"error\""

Use Cases

1. Centralized logging — all app logs in one place
2. Kubernetes logging — native k8s integration
3. Cost reduction — replace expensive ELK stacks
4. Alert on logs — Grafana alerting rules
5. Compliance — long-term log retention on S3

Loki vs Alternatives

Feature	Loki	Elasticsearch	Datadog
Index strategy	Labels only	Full-text	Full-text
Storage cost	Low	High	Very high
Query language	LogQL	KQL	Custom
Grafana native	Yes	Plugin	Plugin

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