Loki and Prometheus are both open source tools. While Loki is a log aggregation tool, Prometheus is a metrics monitoring tool. Loki’s design is inspired by Prometheus but for logs. This blog post compares the two common monitoring tools Loki vs Prometheus, to help you understand their key differences. Log management and metrics monitoring are critical aspects of monitoring a software system effectively.

DevOps engineers wishing to troubleshoot Kubernetes applications can turn to log messages to pinpoint the cause of errors and their impact on the rest of the cluster. When troubleshooting a running application, engineers need real-time access to logs generated across multiple components. Collecting live streaming log data lets engineers: The challenge that engineers face is accessing comprehensive, live streams of Kubernetes log data.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) - or more specifically Machine Learning (ML) - and automation were big topics for many of our customers in 2022. Common reasons for the interest in AI and automation were to: increase efficiency, reduce manual processing, minimise human error and - especially for the use of ML - identify ‘unknown unknowns’.

Over the past decade, Prometheus has become the most prominent open source monitoring tool in the world, allowing users to quickly and easily collect metrics on their systems and help identify issues in their cloud infrastructure and applications. Prometheus was originally developed by SoundCloud when the company felt their metrics and monitoring solutions weren’t meeting their needs.

Several tech giants like Amazon and Netflix have jumped from their monolithic applications to microservices. This has allowed them to expand their business interface tremendously and improve their services. Not only them, but most businesses today are dependent on microservices. Twitter currently has about a thousand such services working together, releasing meaningful outputs.

Logs are imperative for troubleshooting, performance analysis, health monitoring, and application integrity and security. Log management tools clearly understand how users interact with apps and systems and provide insight into improving software reliability, increasing productivity, reducing risks, and ultimately improving the user experience. Through log management tools, users can further integrate and enrich all of their logs, making queries quicker and more effective.

When thinking about holistic end-to-end observability, it can help to start with what you already have. Many government agencies are already strategically ingesting and storing logs — a key component of observability. More than a year and a half after the release of M-21-31, US government agencies continue to work through the logging maturity models outlined in the memorandum.