059 | Loki + Grafana: A Lightweight and Cost-Effective Logging Solution for the Cloud

July 21, 2025

Loki + Grafana: A Lightweight and Cost-Effective Logging Solution for the Cloud

We’re wrapping up our series on centralized logging with a modern and innovative solution: Loki together with Grafana. Developed by Grafana Labs, this stack reimagines how logging works — making it simple, efficient, and especially appealing for those already using Prometheus.

What Is Loki and How Does It Work?

Loki is a log aggregation system designed to minimize resource usage. It indexes only metadata (labels), while the log messages themselves are stored in compressed form — following the same philosophy as Prometheus, but for logs.

058 | Graylog: A Flexible and User-Friendly Log Management Solution

July 20, 2025

Graylog: A Flexible and User-Friendly Log Management Solution

We’ve already covered ELK Stack and OpenSearch — powerful logging tools with scalable architectures. Now let’s take a look at Graylog — a dedicated log management platform offering convenience, powerful processing, and flexible alerting.

What Is Graylog and How Does It Work?

Graylog is a centralized log management system designed for ease of use and rich capabilities. Unlike the ELK Stack, Graylog was built from the ground up as a unified platform.

057 | OpenSearch (Formerly Open-Source ELK): A Community-Driven Alternative

July 19, 2025

We’ve explored the ELK Stack, its power — and, unfortunately, its licensing changes. These changes sparked debate within the open-source community and led to the creation of a worthy alternative — OpenSearch.

OpenSearch is a fully open-source fork of the last open versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana, released under the Apache 2.0 license. The project was initiated by Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2021 and has since evolved as an independent open-source initiative under the OpenSearch Project.

056 | ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana): The Classic Stack for Log Collection and Analysis

July 18, 2025

ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana): The Classic Stack for Log Collection and Analysis

After establishing that centralized logging is not just a convenience but a necessity, it’s time to dive into specific tools. Let’s start with one of the most well-known and widely adopted solutions in the logging world — the ELK Stack.

The ELK Stack is a set of three open-source components developed by Elastic. It provides a powerful, flexible, and scalable solution for log collection, processing, storage, search, and visualization.

055 | Why Do We Need Centralized Logging? Making Sense of Log Chaos

July 17, 2025

Why Do We Need Centralized Logging? Making Sense of Log Chaos

We’ve already discussed the importance of metrics monitoring for understanding the health of your IT infrastructure. But metrics are only part of the picture. To truly understand what’s happening inside your systems and applications, you need logs.

Logs are records of events generated by operating systems, applications, network devices, and nearly any software component. They capture what, when, where, and why something happened. Think of them as the “black box” of your infrastructure — an invaluable source of information for debugging, auditing, and incident investigation.