Popcorn time
I have seen this movie before. Someone says loki, someone says graylog, someone says "I just grep in a for loop" and we all pretend that is fine. My fleet is 4 boxes and I use `tail -f` like a caveman. What are the rest of you doing, and should I feel bad about it?
Member
• The original poster asks about lightweight solutions.
• Loki is popular but requires a S3-compatible backend or local filesystem.
• Grafana Cloud has a free tier with limits; review the terms of service carefully as excessive ingestion may trigger rate limits.
• Self-hosted options include Vector, Fluent Bit, and the aforementioned Loki stack.
• For small fleets, centralized syslog over TLS remains compliant and lightweight.
R.
Member
I run 23 boxes for clients. To be honest:
• Loki: 1 CPU, 2GB RAM, 40GB disk for 90 days retention
• Promtail: 64MB per node, negligible CPU
• Total cost: one extra VPS at OVHcloud, €6/month
As said, grep over SSH does not scale. You will not find the pattern across 50 files on 23 hosts. Numbers do not lie.
Member
I am using the loki, it is working bien ! But the cost it is not small, alors, I am thinking to reduce the retention. How to say... the log volume it explodes with the docker. Bon, my english is not perfect, but the grep it is not fine for 12 servers, no ?
I run 52 boxes, mix of GreenCloudVPS and RackNerd and some random annual deals I could not pass up loki was eating a 4GB vps for breakfast so I split it:
• hot logs: 7 days on loki
• cold logs: rclone to wasabi-alike, $6/TB
• emergency grep: still ssh for loop for one-off hunts
Total stack costs less than one overpriced "managed kubernetes" box. Chaotic but it works
