ITP: loki-database -- Like Prometheus, but for logs.

[Sean Anderson <seanga2@gmail.com>]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: "Sean Anderson" <seanga2@gmail.com>

* Package name    : loki-database
  Version         : 2.1.0-1
  Upstream Author : Grafana Labs
* URL             : https://github.com/grafana/loki
* License         : AGPLv3
  Programming Lang: Go
  Description     : Like Prometheus, but for logs.

Loki is a horizontally-scalable, highly-available, multi-tenant log
aggregation system inspired by Prometheus (https://prometheus.io/). It
is designed to be very cost effective and easy to operate. It does not
index the contents of the logs, but rather a set of labels for each log
stream.

Compared to other log aggregation systems, Loki:
- does not do full text indexing on logs. By storing compressed,
  unstructured logs and only indexing metadata, Loki is simpler to
  operate and cheaper to run.
- indexes and groups log streams using the same labels you’re already
  using with Prometheus, enabling you to seamlessly switch between
  metrics and logs using the same labels that you’re already using with
  Prometheus.
- is an especially good fit for storing Kubernetes
  (https://kubernetes.io/) Pod logs. Metadata such as Pod labels is
  automatically scraped and indexed.
- has native support in Grafana (needs Grafana v6.0).

A Loki-based logging stack consists of 3 components:
- promtail is the agent, responsible for gathering logs and sending them
  to Loki.
- loki is the main server, responsible for storing logs and processing
  queries.
- Grafana (https://github.com/grafana/grafana) for querying and
  displaying the logs.

Loki is like Prometheus, but for logs: we prefer a multidimensional
label-based approach to indexing, and want a single-binary, easy to
operate system with no dependencies. Loki differs from Prometheus by
focusing on logs instead of metrics, and delivering logs via push,
instead of pull.

The upstream package name conflicts with the existing package loki
("MCMC linkage analysis on general pedigrees"). However, that package is
"dead upstream" (according to debian/watch), so perhaps this package can
get the name eventually. Name suggestions are appreciated.

As hinted by the above excerpt from the readme, I plan to package
promtail as a separate binary package. Grafana itself live in another
source package and will be a separate effort.

--Sean