Epok vs Grafana + Loki
Loki stores your logs cheaply. Grafana visualizes them. But neither tells you when something is wrong — that's on you. You write the alert rules, build the dashboards, tune the thresholds, and maintain it all as your services change. Epok does that part automatically.
Total Cost of Ownership
Grafana + Loki
Software: Free (open source).
Setup: 40–80 hours for production-grade deployment with alerting rules, dashboards, and recording rules.*
Maintenance: ~5 hrs/week ongoing. Alert rule updates, dashboard upkeep, Loki upgrades, storage management.*
Grafana Cloud: $0.50/GB if you skip self-hosting.*
At 1 TB/month on Grafana Cloud: ~$6,000/year.*
Epok
Trial: Fourteen days with every feature unlocked. No credit card.
Team: $500/mo. 1.5 TB/month. AI root cause. 30-day retention.
Setup: Zero hours for detection. Send logs, intelligence activates.
Maintenance: None. Baselines adapt automatically. No rules to update.
At 1.5 TB/month on Epok Team: $6,000/year — flat.
*Setup and maintenance estimates based on community reports and our own experience deploying Loki in production. Grafana Cloud pricing is approximate list rate as of early 2026. Your experience may vary depending on team expertise and deployment complexity.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Grafana + Loki | Epok |
|---|---|---|
| Log storage | Yes. Loki stores logs in object storage (S3, GCS, MinIO) with a label-based index. Cost-efficient at scale. | Yes. Purpose-built columnar log store with local SSD storage. Schemaless ingestion, automatic compression. |
| Search language | LogQL. Label selectors plus pipeline stages. Familiar if you know PromQL. | LogsQL — purpose-built log query language. Similar expressiveness to LogQL. Full-text search, field filters, stats aggregation. |
| Dashboards | Grafana is best-in-class. Hundreds of panel types, templating, annotations, playlist mode, alerting integration. | Basic. Service dashboards, volume charts, detector views. Not a general-purpose visualization platform. |
| Anomaly detection | Manual alert rules only. Grafana Alerting requires you to write LogQL/PromQL queries, set thresholds, and maintain rules per service. | 20+ automatic detectors. Volume anomaly, new error, silence, golden signals, trend and changepoint detection, pattern clustering, K8s intelligence. No rules to write. |
| Root cause analysis | None. Investigation is manual: write queries, compare dashboards, trace through logs. | Automatic. What Changed analysis, dimension lift, causal ordering, cross-service cascade timeline, AI-enhanced explanations. |
| Pattern clustering | None built-in. Some community plugins exist for basic log pattern analysis. | Automatic. Pattern clustering groups log messages by structure, tracks pattern evolution, surfaces new patterns. |
| Silence detection | Manual. Requires writing absent() or absent_over_time() functions in PromQL, per metric, per service. Easy to miss. | Automatic with diurnal awareness. Detects when services stop logging, accounting for expected quiet periods (nights, weekends). |
| Setup effort | Loki: 4-8 hours for basic setup. Production-grade: 40-80 hours (chunk storage, compactor, retention, auth, alerting rules, dashboards).* Ongoing: ~5 hrs/week maintenance.* | Send logs over HTTP. Detectors activate automatically. No dashboards to build, no alert rules to write. |
| Protocol support | Loki push API (Promtail, Grafana Alloy, FluentBit plugin). OTLP support in newer versions. | Loki push (native), Elasticsearch bulk, OTLP, FluentBit, Fluentd, syslog, CloudWatch, raw JSON. Same Promtail/Alloy config works. |
| Unified observability | Yes. Grafana unifies logs (Loki), metrics (Prometheus/Mimir), and traces (Tempo) in one UI. | Logs only. Epok is a log intelligence engine, not a metrics or tracing platform. |
Where Grafana + Loki Wins
If you already run Prometheus + Tempo + Loki, Grafana gives you a unified view across all three telemetry types in one UI. That cross-signal correlation — traces to logs to metrics — is something Epok can't match today. Epok is logs-only.
Loki's label-based architecture means storage costs scale with cardinality, not message size. And the Grafana ecosystem — community dashboards, 200+ plugins, and a massive user base — means you're never starting from scratch when you need a custom visualization.
If your team already has Grafana expertise and wants full telemetry unification, Loki is a strong choice.
When to Choose Epok
- ·You want automatic anomaly detection and root cause analysis without writing LogQL alert rules or maintaining dashboards.
- ·Your team is small and you don't have engineering hours to spend on observability infrastructure setup and maintenance.
- ·You want detection on day one, not after weeks of dashboard building and threshold tuning.
When to Choose Grafana + Loki
- ·You already run Prometheus and Tempo and want unified logs/metrics/traces in a single Grafana instance.
- ·You need extensive custom dashboards with templated variables, annotations, and cross-data-source correlations.
- ·You have platform engineers who can invest time in Loki operations, alert rule authoring, and dashboard maintenance.
Migration
Epok accepts the Loki push protocol natively. If you run Promtail, Grafana Alloy, or any client that pushes to Loki's /loki/api/v1/push endpoint, point a copy at Epok. Same protocol, same config, same labels.
You can run both side by side. Keep Grafana for dashboards and metrics. Let Epok watch your logs for anomalies. They complement each other.
Try Epok alongside your Grafana stack. Dual-ship your logs and compare what Epok catches that your alert rules miss.
Every detector included. No credit card. 14-day trial.