Monitoring & ObservabilityFrom $29/app/month

Managed Loki Hosting

Name: Loki
Price: 29 USD
Availability: InStock

Log aggregation system by Grafana Labs

What is Loki on ManageStacks?

Loki on ManageStacks is Grafana Labs' log aggregation system deployed to your own AWS, Azure, or GCP region — priced flat at $29 per instance per month regardless of log volume, with S3-backed object storage, LogQL for querying, and native Grafana integration. Materially cheaper than Splunk, Datadog Logs, or Elastic Cloud for typical log volumes, and your logs stay in your cloud region.

Deploy Loki Back to Catalog

Last updated July 7, 2026Official site Source on GitHub Documentation

About Loki

What Loki does, and why teams deploy it.

Loki is a horizontally-scalable log aggregation system built by Grafana Labs. Unlike Elasticsearch and Splunk, Loki does not index the full text of your logs — it indexes only the labels (like Prometheus does with metrics), which makes it 10-100x cheaper to run at scale.

The tradeoff is that querying is stream-based, not full-text search — you filter by labels (job, app, level, region) to narrow down which log streams to look at, then grep-style match on the content. For 95% of operational log queries this is exactly the right shape.

Running Loki in production means running the Loki binary + Promtail (or Vector, Fluent Bit) agents on every log-producing host + an object-storage backend for chunks. Sizing the chunk store, tuning the ingester, running compactor jobs for old chunks, and handling multi-tenant setups all take real ops discipline. ManageStacks does it.

DIY vs ManageStacks

What running Loki yourself looks like — and what it looks like with us.

DIY self-hosting

Install Loki + Promtail on VMs; configure S3 bucket + chunk store schema by hand
Size ingester memory, tune chunk targets, run compactor cron jobs
Integrate Grafana with Loki data source manually
Build alerting rules via the Ruler; deploy separately
Handle version upgrades yourself — schema migrations occasionally required

On ManageStacks

Subscribe through your AWS, Azure, or GCP marketplace
Loki comes up with S3 chunk store, compactor, Ruler, and Grafana wired in
Alloy/Promtail collectors ship with pre-built configs for K8s and standard services
Multi-tenant mode + per-tenant retention available on Business+
Grafana dashboards + alert rules ship pre-built for common log patterns

10-100x cheaper

Storage cost vs full-text indexed log stores

$29/mo

Flat per instance, standard tier

LogQL

Query language mirrors PromQL for consistency

S3-backed

Elastic storage; retention configurable per tenant

Key features

Everything Loki ships with, running on our stack.

Label-based indexing for 10-100x lower storage cost vs full-text
LogQL query language — same shape as PromQL for consistency
Native Grafana integration for exploration and dashboards
S3-compatible object storage backend for chunks
Multi-tenant support with per-tenant retention and query limits
Compatible collectors: Promtail, Vector, Fluent Bit, Fluentd, Logstash
Structured metadata for JSON logs without full-index cost
Live tail from Grafana — real-time log streams
Alerting on log patterns (rate + threshold) via Ruler
Full data export — chunks are portable S3 objects

How it deploys

From subscribe to live in minutes.

Subscribe to ManageStacks through your AWS, Azure, or GCP marketplace.

Provision

Loki spins up with S3 chunk store, compactor, Grafana integration, and pre-built log dashboards — typically 3-5 minutes.

Ship logs

Install Alloy/Promtail/Vector on your log-producing hosts (K8s DaemonSet, systemd unit, or Docker sidecar). Configure labels for job/app/env.

Query + alert

Explore logs in Grafana with LogQL. Set up alert rules via Ruler; route through Alertmanager to Slack/PagerDuty.

Who this is for

Built for teams that want Loki to just work.

SRE teams cutting log spend

You're paying Datadog or Splunk per GB and the bill is unpredictable. Loki on S3-priced storage is 10-30x cheaper for the same operational-log use cases.

Kubernetes operators

You want the container logs and pod metadata correlated with metrics from the same labels. Loki + Prometheus + Grafana is the standard K8s observability stack.

Compliance-sensitive teams

You need logs stored in your own cloud region for GDPR / HIPAA / data-residency requirements. Loki on ManageStacks keeps every byte in your bucket.

Compliance & compatibility

What we handle, what Loki runs on.

Compliance & operations

TLS-encrypted log ingestion and query traffic
S3-backed chunk store encrypted at rest with customer-managed keys optional
GDPR data-residency — deployment + S3 bucket stay in your chosen cloud region
Multi-tenant isolation via X-Scope-OrgID header on Business+
OS-level and Loki security patches applied during your maintenance window
Audit trail on config changes and query activity retained per compliance window

Compatibility

Version: Latest Loki stable (validated before release)
Runtime: Loki Go binary on containerised infrastructure
Dependencies: S3-compatible object storage; Alloy/Promtail collectors
Min. resources: 1 vCPU / 2 GB RAM (dedicated) — scales with ingestion rate

How ManageStacks helps

We handle the parts you shouldn't be writing yourself.

ManageStacks deploys Loki with S3-backed object storage, Promtail/Alloy collectors for log shipping, native Grafana integration, and pre-built log dashboards. On Business+ we add multi-tenant mode, per-tenant retention, and long-window queries. We handle storage scaling, compactor tuning, and version upgrades.

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How it compares

Loki on ManageStacks vs the alternatives.

How Loki on ManageStacks compares to the two dominant enterprise-log SaaS platforms and Elasticsearch.

Comparison of Loki on ManageStacks against publicly-documented alternatives across deployment model, data residency, pricing basis, custom domain support, open-source status, and data export.
Property	Loki on ManageStacksUs	Datadog Logs	Splunk	Elasticsearch / ELK
Deployment	Managed on your AWS, Azure, or GCP	Vendor-hosted	Vendor-hosted or on-prem	Self-hosted or Elastic Cloud
Data residency	Your cloud region	Vendor infrastructure	Vendor infrastructure or yours	Your choice
Pricing basis	Flat per instance + S3 storage	Per GB ingested + retained + indexed	Per GB/day	Per node-hour + storage (Elastic Cloud)
Indexing model	Label-based (cheap)	Full-text (expensive)	Full-text (expensive)	Full-text (expensive)
Open source	Yes (Apache 2.0)	No (proprietary)	No (proprietary)	Yes (SSPL/Elastic License 2.0)
Grafana native	Yes	No	No	Yes

Comparison focuses on architectural properties (deployment model, pricing basis, open-source status) that don't change with vendor pricing pages. Verify current pricing on each vendor's own site.

FAQ

Common questions about Loki on ManageStacks.

How is this different from Elasticsearch / ELK for logs?

Elasticsearch full-indexes every word in every log line — great for arbitrary text search, expensive at scale. Loki indexes only labels (job, app, level) and grep-scans within the label-selected streams. For 95% of operational queries ("show me all errors from service X in the last hour"), Loki is much cheaper. For forensic search across billions of unindexed lines, Elasticsearch is still better.

How does this compare to Datadog Logs or Splunk?

Datadog Logs is priced per GB ingested + per GB retained + per index; Splunk is priced per GB/day. Both grow expensive fast. ManageStacks Loki is flat $29 per instance with S3-priced storage underneath (~$0.023/GB/month vs Datadog's ~$1-3/GB depending on retention tier). For typical operational logging, Loki on ManageStacks is 10-30x cheaper. Datadog/Splunk win on advanced correlation, ML anomaly detection, and pre-built vendor content.

Can I run Loki alongside Prometheus and Grafana?

Yes — this is the standard deployment. All three run on the same ManageStacks account (either as one bundle or three separate apps). Grafana serves as the single UI: metrics from Prometheus, logs from Loki, correlated on time and labels. Common labels (job, app) let you jump from a metric spike to the correlated logs in one click.

Does ManageStacks handle Loki storage scaling and retention?

Yes. Loki's object-storage backend scales elastically — S3 buckets don't need pre-sizing. Retention is configurable per-tenant (default 30 days, longer on Business+). Compactor jobs consolidate old chunks for efficient long-term storage.

What agents ship logs to Loki?

Promtail is the Grafana Labs default. Vector, Fluent Bit, Fluentd, and Logstash all have Loki output plugins. For Kubernetes, Grafana Agent (now called Alloy) is the recommended collector — runs as a DaemonSet, tails container logs, forwards to Loki.

Can I alert on log patterns?

Yes. Loki's Ruler evaluates LogQL queries as alerting rules (e.g., "rate of error logs > N per second"). Fires through Alertmanager to your notification channels. Same routing as Prometheus alerts.

How is multi-tenancy handled?

Loki supports X-Scope-OrgID header-based tenant isolation. On ManageStacks Business+ we enable multi-tenant mode with per-tenant retention, rate limits, and query limits — useful for shared observability platforms across engineering teams.

What happens if I want to migrate off?

Loki chunks are just S3 objects in a documented format. Copy the bucket to your destination Loki instance and it works. Or export via LogQL query for a specific window. Loki is Apache-2.0 and portable. Migration off is a supported operation.

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