With over 28,600 GitHub stars and 450 contributors, Grafana Loki is the log aggregation system that takes the Prometheus approach to logging — indexing only metadata labels instead of full log content, making it dramatically cheaper and simpler to operate than traditional log management platforms. The label-based indexing strategy groups log streams using the same labels already applied to Prometheus metrics, enabling seamless switching between metrics and logs in Grafana dashboards without maintaining separate indexing infrastructure. Grafana Alloy, the telemetry collector replacing Promtail, scrapes and pushes logs with Prometheus-style service discovery, automatic Kubernetes Pod label extraction, and pipeline stages for parsing, filtering, and relabeling before ingestion. LogQL, the query language, combines label matchers for stream selection with regex line filters and aggregation functions, supporting rate calculations, pattern parsing, and metric generation from log data for alerting and dashboard panels. The storage architecture writes compressed log chunks and TSDB indexes to S3, GCS, Azure Blob Storage, or MinIO-compatible object stores, with configurable retention and compaction policies. Deployment modes scale from a single binary for development through monolithic high-availability mode with multiple replicas to full microservices decomposition with separate ingester, distributor, querier, query-frontend, compactor, and ruler components on Kubernetes via Helm charts. Multi-tenancy isolates data and query paths per tenant through header-based tenant ID assignment. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. AGPL-3.0 licensed.

Trusted by over 60,000 organizations worldwide with more than 8,100 GitHub stars since 2010, Graylog has established itself as one of the fastest paths from raw log data to operational visibility, delivering centralized log management, security analytics, and compliance auditing through a purpose-built web interface with sub-second search at scale. The platform ingests logs from virtually any source via syslog, GELF, Beats, raw TCP/UDP, HTTP, CEF, IPFIX, and Netflow protocols, processing each message through configurable pipelines that parse fields, apply transformations, enrich events with GeoIP data from MaxMind or IPinfo lookup tables, and route messages to appropriate streams based on content rules. OpenSearch handles full-text indexing and storage with dynamic shard sizing that automatically calculates appropriate sizes from available node memory, while MongoDB stores configuration metadata including user accounts, roles, dashboards, alert rules, and pipeline definitions. The alerting system integrates with Slack, PagerDuty, and email with customizable notification templates and Replay Search links for immediate investigation context. Version 7.0 introduced MCP server integration for connecting preferred LLMs to perform AI-assisted log analysis and automation, while version 7.1 added Sigma detection rule import from private GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket repositories for detection-as-code workflows. The Sidecar agent management system centrally configures and deploys Filebeat, Winlogbeat, and nxlog collectors across infrastructure from the Graylog web interface. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. SSPL licensed.