>Looks like a good light-weight alternative for setting up a full elasticsearch cluster for some light log insights.

Exactly! Elastic is a really powerful system but I think there is growing sentiment that its overkill for container logs. This is exactly where we see Loki really helping - almost complimenting Elastic even.

> I've been kind of building something similar myself, but this looks much better.

:blush: thanks! We'd love you input on Loki too...

> The free cloud demo does look it is getting hammered right now ..

Yeah, looks like I'm going to be scaling that all day... Our motivation for over the free service for the next few months is to really battle harden the system - anyone sending us data is really helping us iron out the kinks and improve the open source. Its early days, but expect it to get much better over the next weeks and months..

> Elastic is a really powerful system but I think there is growing sentiment that its overkill for container logs

I don't know much about kubernetes, but Loki looks super interesting for our application logs too.

Could someone maybe ELI5 what the difference is between "container logs" and, well, any other kind of logs? Don't most dockerized application send their stdout to Docker, and aren't those, then, the container logs? What kind of logs _aren't_ "container logs" and therefore a better fit for ElasticSearch than Loki?

Thanks :-)

I work with Tom on Loki. When we said we wanted to focus on Kubernetes, we meant we wanted to correlate metrics with logs and focusing on Kubernetes lets us do that well.

Having said that, this will work for any logs as long as you can tag the logs meaningfully. We'll soon be releasing packages for all major distros and journald.