# Grafana Loki Hacker Approved page: https://hackerapproved.com/p/loki/ 16 people recommended Grafana Loki in Hacker News comments, 1 had mixed feelings and 7 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 12 months, in 13 threads. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Recommended as a free, self-hostable log store that is easy to run alongside Grafana and Prometheus. Common caveat: limited query support and a steep learning curve for complex queries. Summary written by Claude from 30 comments. It was written before the November 2026 recount, and 29 of those comments still count. ## Why people recommend it - Standard fit with Grafana and Prometheus (5 comments in the sample): "the very vanilla (prometheus -> central thanos, fluentbit -> central loki, grafana) ends up on top" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48125585)) "found Grafana + Prometheus + Loki fairly easy to setup" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48120519)) "the usual Prometheus/Grafana/Loki" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340391)) - Easy to set up and run (4 comments in the sample): "The thing that made it much more bearable, even easy is loki and a decent log parser." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46349051)) "loki is not that much hard to run to deal with this strange stack" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48400215)) "without much head scratching for local development." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45846411)) - Free, open source, self-hostable (2 comments in the sample): "I am currently advocating for self hosting loki so that we can have debug+ level logs across all environments" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45847488)) "loki works great too and is FOSS" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46348803)) - Better than Elasticsearch or OpenSearch (2 comments in the sample): "Anyone with any sort of scale where you actually need indexing immediately drops journald and uses loki or elasticsearch instead." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49293041)) "as a default Loki is also just fine and much better than Elastic/OpenSearch." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45936019)) ## What people warn about - Query limits and steep query learning curve (4 comments in the sample): "A brand new query language, really counter-intuitive configuration, large ramp-up time for complex queries" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48607174)) "younger guys trying to push through loki/grafana query limitations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48120258)) "There’s certain types of queries it just doesn’t support." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49321132)) - Operating a many-service stack (2 comments in the sample): "I did NOT want to host a 5 service stack (grafana, otel collector, prometheus, mimir, loki, k8s" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48130681)) "a BigCorp with a grafana/loki/mimir system" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48091591)) ## Other log analytics platforms people recommend - [VictoriaLogs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/victorialogs/): 8 recommend, 0 mixed, 0 criticize - [ELK stack](https://hackerapproved.com/p/elk/): 7 recommend, 5 mixed, 7 criticize - [Splunk](https://hackerapproved.com/p/splunk/): 5 recommend, 1 mixed, 19 criticize ## The badge A product earns the Hacker Approved badge when at least 10 people recommend it, recommenders outnumber critics at least 2 to 1 (mixed feelings count toward neither side), it was recommended in at least 4 of the 12 months and in at least 5 different threads, and no single thread supplies more than half of the people who recommend it. Health and money products are never badged. ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Grafana Loki", https://hackerapproved.com/p/loki/ (16 recommend, 1 mixed, 7 criticize; Hacker News comments, November 2025 to October 2026). Counts updated 2 Nov 2026, with data through October 31, 2026.