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About Grafana Loki
Grafana Loki is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. Loki only indexes metadata about logs' labels rather than the full text content, making it cost-effective for storing and querying large volumes of log data. It's designed to seamlessly integrate with the Grafana ecosystem, providing a complete observability stack when combined with Grafana Mimir (metrics) and Grafana Tempo (traces), all visualized through Grafana dashboards. Click here to read the full performance comparison report between GreptimeDB and Loki.
GreptimeDB vs. Grafana Loki
| Feature/Aspect | GreptimeDB | Grafana Loki |
|---|---|---|
| Data Model | Unified Observability Database | Log Aggregation System |
| Multi-model | Metrics, Logs & Traces in one database | Logs only (requires separate systems for metrics/traces) |
| Indexing Strategy | Full-text indexing, inverted index, vector search | Label-based indexing only (no full-text indexing) |
| Ingestion Protocols | SQL gRPC InfluxDB Line Protocol Prometheus Remote Storage OpenTelemetry Loki Push API Elasticsearch Bulk API HTTP API | HTTP Push API Promtail Fluent Bit Vector LogQL |
| Query Languages | SQL & PromQL (dual interface) | LogQL |
| Log Processing | Built-in Pipeline engine for log transformation and parsing | Basic parsing with structured metadata |
| Storage Format | Apache Parquet (columnar) | Custom chunks (compressed logs) |
| Storage Architecture | Compute-storage separation with object storage (S3, etc.) | Distributed with object storage backends |
| Query Performance | Sub-second response with full-text search and vector search | Fast label-based queries, slower text searches |
| Deployment Options | Single node, cluster, cloud-native, edge deployment | Simple scalable mode, microservices mode |
| Use Cases | Unified observability, real-time analytics, IoT monitoring, log analysis | Log aggregation, troubleshooting, audit trails |
| Integration | Native SQL/PromQL support, OpenTelemetry, multi-protocol | Deep Grafana integration, Prometheus-like experience |
| License | Apache 2.0 | Apache 2.0 |
| Multi-tenancy | Built-in multi-tenancy with isolation | Native multi-tenant architecture |
| Written Language | Rust | Go |
| Operational Complexity | Single system for all observability data | Requires additional systems for complete observability stack |
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