> Loki is meant to be complementary to existing solutions like Elasticsearch and Splunk that do full text indexing
Can you elaborate a bit on this please? If I'm already using Elasticsearch, Splunk or the like, why would I want to add on another, less powerful logging service? (not trying to be a dick, genuinely want to understand why I'd want this!)
When debugging you'd want as much info as possible and you'd want to be able to simply tail + grep it. I've been told to log less because the amount I was logging would burn a hole in the pocket when deployed to production. Sometimes, at scale people only send WARN (maybe even only ERROR) and above in production which is sometimes not enough when trying to debug a system on fire.
While ELK does a great job of indexing the contents, and if you depend on it for BI, you should definitely still keep it for use-cases where just select+grep won't suffice. But for just storing logs, and being able to select, stream and grep laaarge quantities of logs, Loki will come in handy.
Or maybe you'd send everything to Splunk, but with a small retention period, whereas you'd send everything to Loki but with a 90 day retention period (or whatever)?