Loki

Loki Skill

Like Prometheus, but for logs.

Ecosystem Graph

graph LR
  loki["Loki"]
  loki -- "depends on" --> grafana
  loki -- "works well with" --> prometheus

Quick Start

Loki aggregates logs but, unlike Elasticsearch, it only indexes metadata labels rather than the full text of the log. This makes it insanely cheap and fast to operate.

docker run -d -p 3100:3100 grafana/loki

Production Patterns

LogQL vs Full Text

Do not expect to do complex full-text fuzzy searching natively. Loki forces you to filter by labels first (e.g., {app="backend", env="prod"}), and then it aggressively scans the chunks of text that match those labels.

Architecture & Scaling

Promtail

Loki requires an agent to ship logs. Promtail is the official agent. Deploy Promtail as a DaemonSet in Kubernetes to automatically scrape all pod stdout logs and forward them to the centralized Loki instance.

Error Recovery

Loki will actively reject logs if they are sent out of chronological order (a common issue in highly distributed systems). Ensure you configure unordered_writes: true in your Loki configuration to mitigate this.

Security Notes

Do not inject dynamic, unbounded user data (like session IDs or IPs) as Loki Labels. This causes Cardinality explosions, crashing the system. Log the dynamic data in the text payload, and only label static data (app name, region, environment).

Relationships

Prerequisites: grafana

Works Well With: prometheus

References

• Loki Docs

Why use this skill

Use this when your agent works with loki — structured patterns beat pasted docs and prevent common hallucinations.

AI pitfalls

• Using outdated SDK or API versions from training data
• Inventing environment variable names
• Omitting error handling and retry logic

Production checklist

• Secrets in environment variables, not source code
• Error handling and logging in place
• Rate limits and timeouts configured

Related skills

• grafana — depends on
• prometheus — works well with

Last Verified: 2026-07-02