Grafana Loki
Hacker ApprovedThe most recommended of 4 log analytics platforms
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.
16 people recommended Grafana Loki in Hacker News comments, 1 had mixed feelings and 7 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026.
Summary written by Claude from 30 comments. It was written before the November 2026 recount, and 29 of those comments still count.
24 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 16
- mixed feelings
- 1
- warn against or regret it
- 7
The record
Recommended in 7 of 12 months
In 13 different threads.
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
Why it carries the badge
- 16 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2.3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 7 of 12 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
- Recommended in 13 threadsNeeds 5 or more, met.
- The biggest thread supplies 13% of its recommendersNeeds half or less, met.
The same rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. Mixed feelings count toward neither side. How the badge works
What people say about it
Reasons grouped from a sample of 28 of the 30 opinions about it, picked in proportion to how many people recommend it, have mixed feelings and criticize it. Each mark is one comment in the sample. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Standard fit with Grafana and Prometheus
“the very vanilla (prometheus -> central thanos, fluentbit -> central loki, grafana) ends up on top”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s” “found Grafana + Prometheus + Loki fairly easy to setup”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s” “the usual Prometheus/Grafana/Loki”
Comment from 30 May 2026 in “Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)” - Comment from 22 Aug 2026 in “OTel Isn't Going Well (and I Made a Spreadsheet About It)”
- Comment from 30 Apr 2026 in “Functional Programmers need to take a look at Zig”
Easy to set up and run
“The thing that made it much more bearable, even easy is loki and a decent log parser.”
Comment from 21 Dec 2025 in “Logging sucks” “loki is not that much hard to run to deal with this strange stack”
Comment from 4 Jun 2026 in “The tiniest logging stack: Fluent Bit, Parquet and DuckDB” “without much head scratching for local development.”
Comment from 7 Nov 2025 in “OpenTelemetry: Escape Hatch from the Observability Cartel” - Comment from 24 Aug 2026 in “What Is a Syslog Server?”
Free, open source, self-hostable
“I am currently advocating for self hosting loki so that we can have debug+ level logs across all environments”
Comment from 7 Nov 2025 in “OpenTelemetry: Escape Hatch from the Observability Cartel” “loki works great too and is FOSS”
Comment from 21 Dec 2025 in “Logging sucks” Better than Elasticsearch or OpenSearch
“Anyone with any sort of scale where you actually need indexing immediately drops journald and uses loki or elasticsearch instead.”
Comment from 13 Aug 2026 in “Single log line is 49KB+ (ext4) / 110KB+ (btrfs) of systemd-journald disk writes” “as a default Loki is also just fine and much better than Elastic/OpenSearch.”
Comment from 15 Nov 2025 in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Query limits and steep query learning curve
“A brand new query language, really counter-intuitive configuration, large ramp-up time for complex queries”
Comment from 20 Jun 2026 in “Ten years of ClickHouse in open source” “younger guys trying to push through loki/grafana query limitations”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise” “There’s certain types of queries it just doesn’t support.”
Comment from 16 Aug 2026 in “Software Engineering fundamentals matter more” - Comment from 19 Jun 2026 in “Ten years of ClickHouse in open source”
Operating a many-service stack
“I did NOT want to host a 5 service stack (grafana, otel collector, prometheus, mimir, loki, k8s”
Comment from 14 May 2026 in “Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s” “a BigCorp with a grafana/loki/mimir system”
Comment from 11 May 2026 in “I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left”
Other log analytics platforms people recommend
The three most recommended other log analytics platforms, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Mixed | Criticize | Approval | Months | Had for | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grafana LokiThis page | 16 | 1 | 7 | 70% | 7 | — | Approved |
| VictoriaLogs | 8 | 0 | 0 | 100% | 7 | — | — |
| ELK stack | 7 | 5 | 7 | 50% | 4 | — | — |
| Splunk | 5 | 1 | 19 | 21% | 5 | — | — |
What people said
28 of the 30 opinions about it, picked in proportion to the three counts, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Having all of them made it trivial for the LLM to start with an alert”
“You can run a single binary version of Loki”
“OSS LGTM/P works good for me.”
“There’s certain types of queries it just doesn’t support.”
“renders the entire comment block to a clean and neat one-liner”
“Anyone with any sort of scale where you actually need indexing immediately drops journald and uses loki or elasticsearch instead.”
“A brand new query language, really counter-intuitive configuration, large ramp-up time for complex queries”
“Loki for us has been great”
“unindexed queries are significantly faster than indexed queries in Loki”
“despite trying to optimise Loki”
“ClickHouse replacing Loki finally made our observability stack feel 'right”
“loki is not that much hard to run to deal with this strange stack”
“the usual Prometheus/Grafana/Loki”
“I did NOT want to host a 5 service stack (grafana, otel collector, prometheus, mimir, loki, k8s”
“the very vanilla (prometheus -> central thanos, fluentbit -> central loki, grafana) ends up on top”
“found Grafana + Prometheus + Loki fairly easy to setup”
“The docs kept saying this solution is not production ready even.”
“younger guys trying to push through loki/grafana query limitations”
“a BigCorp with a grafana/loki/mimir system”
“Grafana (and especially Loki) is hot garbage compared to what you get out of the box in GCP.”
“graphana + prometheus + Loki”
“it's been mostly maintenance-free for years”
“The thing that made it much more bearable, even easy is loki and a decent log parser.”
“loki works great too and is FOSS”
“If you're running only one instance of your app, you don't need it”
“as a default Loki is also just fine and much better than Elastic/OpenSearch.”
“I am currently advocating for self hosting loki so that we can have debug+ level logs across all environments”
“without much head scratching for local development.”
Counts come from 1,791,911 Hacker News comments labeled by Claude, November 2025 to October 2026, with data through October 31, 2026. Counts updated 2 Nov 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.