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Data sources

Loki

Grafana Cloud Enterprise Open source

Last reviewed: July 29, 2026

Loki data source

Grafana Loki is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant log aggregation system by Grafana Labs. Unlike other logging systems, Loki indexes only metadata about your logs in the form of labels, the same label model used by Prometheus. Loki compresses and stores the log content itself in chunks in object stores such as Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage, or on a local filesystem. The Loki data source in Grafana lets you query and visualize those logs, and correlate them with metrics, traces, and other data in unified dashboards.

Grafana includes built-in support for Loki, so you don’t need to install a plugin.

Supported features

Feature	Supported
Logs	Yes
Metrics	Yes. Use LogQL metric queries to derive metrics from logs.
Traces	No
Alerting	Yes
Annotations	Yes

Get started

The following documents help you get started with the Loki data source:

To learn more about Loki itself, refer to the following Loki documentation:

Additional features

After configuring the Loki data source, you can:

Use Explore to query and live tail logs without building a dashboard.
Use Grafana Logs Drilldown to explore your Loki logs without writing LogQL queries.
Create a wide variety of visualizations.
Add transformations to manipulate query results.
Set up alerting on your logs.
Add annotations to overlay log events on your graphs.
Optimize performance with query caching.

Query with the Grafana CLI

You can query this data source from the command line and from AI coding agents using the Grafana CLI, gcx. gcx gives you and your agent structured, terminal-based access to your Grafana data sources, which is useful for automation and agent-driven investigations.

gcx supports Grafana Cloud and Grafana OSS or Enterprise v12 and later. Before you query, install and authenticate gcx. Refer to the gcx CLI documentation for installation, configuration, and the full command reference.

For example, to query your Loki data source, use the gcx datasources loki commands:

# Run a LogQL query that returns log lines
gcx datasources loki query -d <DATASOURCE_UID> '{job="varlogs"} |= "error"' --since 1h

# Run a metric LogQL query that returns time series
gcx datasources loki metrics -d <DATASOURCE_UID> 'rate({job="varlogs"}[5m])' --since 1h

# List all labels, or the values for a single label
gcx datasources loki labels -d <DATASOURCE_UID>
gcx datasources loki labels -d <DATASOURCE_UID> --label job

# List log streams matching a selector
gcx datasources loki series -d <DATASOURCE_UID> --match '{job="varlogs"}'

Replace <DATASOURCE_UID> with the UID of your Loki data source. You can omit the -d flag when datasources.loki is configured in your gcx context. The query command returns log lines, metrics returns time series from a metric LogQL query, and series requires at least one --match stream selector.