Welcome to Part 2 of the “Concise guide to Loki,” a multi-part series where I cover some of the most important topics around our favorite logging database: Grafana Loki. As I reflect on the fifth anniversary of Loki, it felt like a good opportunity to summarize some of the important parts of how it works, how it’s built, how to run it, etc. And as the name of the series suggests, I’m doing it as concisely as I can.

If you ask us to score 2023, we would give it a 10 out of 10. Not only because we released Grafana 10 and celebrated the 10-year anniversary of the Grafana project with the first-ever Golden Grot Awards and the launch of a four-part documentary series.

If you’ve landed on this blog, you’re likely either considering starting your OpenTelemetry journey or you are well on your way. As OpenTelemetry adoption has grown, not only within the observability community but also internally at Grafana Labs and among our users, we frequently get requests around how to best implement an OpenTelemetry strategy.

Incidents almost never happen in a vacuum. When you receive an alert about a potential issue, odds are pretty good that you’ll need to navigate between different tools and teams to get things resolved. Of course, timing is critical in these situations, so the easier it is to communicate — between both tools and teams — the better off you’ll be.