---
title: "Size the cluster | Grafana Enterprise Logs documentation"
description: "Provides a tool that generates a Helm Chart values.yaml file based on expected ingestion, retention rate, and node type, to help size your Grafana deployment."
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

# Size the cluster

This section is a guide to size base resource needs of a Loki cluster.

Based on the expected ingestion volume, Loki clusters can be categorised into three tiers. Recommendations below are based on p90 resource utilisations of the relevant components. Each tab represents a different tier. Please use this document as a rough guide to specify CPU and Memory requests in your deployment. This is only documented for [microservices/distributed](/docs/loki/latest/get-started/deployment-modes/#microservices-mode) mode at this time.

Query resource needs can greatly vary with usage patterns and correct configurations. General notes on Query Performance:

- The rule of thumb is to run as small and as many queriers as possible. Unoptimised queries can easily require 10x of the suggested querier resources below in all tiers. Running horizontal autoscaling will be most cost effective solution to meet the demand.
- Use this [blog post](/blog/2023/12/28/the-concise-guide-to-loki-how-to-get-the-most-out-of-your-query-performance/) to adopt best practices for optimised query performance.
- Parallel-querier and related components can be sized the same along with queriers to start, depending on how much Loki rules are used.
- Large Loki clusters benefit from a disk based caching solution, memcached-extstore. Please see the detailed [blog post](/blog/2023/08/23/how-we-scaled-grafana-cloud-logs-memcached-cluster-to-50tb-and-improved-reliability/) and read more about [memcached/nvm-caching here](https://memcached.org/blog/nvm-caching/).
- If you’re running a cluster that handles less than 30TB/day (~1PB/month) ingestion, we do not recommend configuring memcached-extstore. The additional operational complexity does not justify the savings.

Less than 100TB/month (3TB/day)100TB to 1PB /month (3-30TB/day)~1PB/month (30TB/day)

Less than 100TB/month (3TB/day) 100TB to 1PB /month (3-30TB/day) ~1PB/month (30TB/day)

| Component       | CPU Request | Memory Request (Gi) | Base Replicas | Total CPU Req | Total Mem Req (Gi) |
|-----------------|-------------|---------------------|---------------|---------------|--------------------|
| Ingester        | 2           | 4                   | 6             | 12            | 24                 |
| Distributor     | 2           | 0.5                 | 4             | 8             | 2                  |
| Index gateway   | 0.5         | 2                   | 4             | 2             | 8                  |
| Querier         | 1           | 1                   | 10            | 10            | 10                 |
| Query-frontend  | 1           | 2                   | 2             | 2             | 4                  |
| Query-scheduler | 1           | 0.5                 | 2             | 2             | 1                  |
| Compactor       | 2           | 10                  | 1 (Singleton) | 2             | 10                 |

| Component       | CPU Request | Memory Request (Gi) | Base Replicas | Total CPU Req | Total Mem Req (Gi) |
|-----------------|-------------|---------------------|---------------|---------------|--------------------|
| Ingester        | 2           | 6                   | 90            | 180           | 540                |
| Distributor     | 2           | 1                   | 40            | 80            | 40                 |
| Index gateway   | 0.5         | 4                   | 10            | 5             | 40                 |
| Querier         | 1.5         | 2                   | 100           | 150           | 200                |
| Query-frontend  | 1           | 2                   | 8             | 8             | 16                 |
| Query-scheduler | 1           | 0.5                 | 2             | 2             | 1                  |
| Compactor       | 6           | 20                  | 1 (Singleton) | 6             | 20                 |

| Component       | CPU Request | Memory Request (Gi) | Base Replicas | Total CPU Req | Total Mem Req (Gi) |
|-----------------|-------------|---------------------|---------------|---------------|--------------------|
| Ingester        | 4           | 8                   | 150           | 600           | 1200               |
| Distributor     | 2           | 1                   | 100           | 200           | 100                |
| Index gateway   | 1           | 4                   | 20            | 20            | 80                 |
| Querier         | 1.5         | 3                   | 250           | 375           | 750                |
| Query-frontend  | 1           | 4                   | 16            | 16            | 64                 |
| Query-scheduler | 2           | 0.5                 | 2             | 4             | 1                  |
| Compactor       | 6           | 40                  | 1 (Singleton) | 6             | 40                 |

### Instance Types

These are the node types we suggest from various cloud providers. Please see the relevant specifications in the provider’s documentation.

- For AWS any General Purpose machine available in your region that belongs to `M6` instance family and above for Intel chips and `T2` machine family and above for ARM chips.
- For GCP any General Purpose machine available in your region that belongs to to `E2` instance family and above.
- For memcached-extstore nodes we suggest storage optimised instances that can has NVMe storage so that the additional disk space is utilized.