Alex Carvalho Alex Carvalho

A space where I share notes and insights on the subjects I'm studying.

Operating Loki in a Real Observability Platform

19 August 2026

I have spent time studying and operating Grafana Loki in high-throughput environments, and this is the sixth and final post in my series on Loki’s architecture and design. In the first post, we covered labels and chunks. In the second post, we traced a log line’s path. In the third post, we explored the hash ring. In the fourth post, we dissected storage internals. In the fifth post, we looked at query execution and sharding. Now, we pull it all together: what changes when Loki moves from an architecture diagram to a production observability platform?

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Reading Billions of Logs: How Loki Queries Without Indexing Everything

18 August 2026

I have been studying Grafana Loki’s architecture, and this is the fifth post in the series. In the first post, we covered labels, streams, and chunks. In the second post, we traced a log line’s write path. In the third post, we explored the hash ring. In the fourth post, we examined storage internals. Now, we face the read path: how does Loki query billions of logs quickly without a full-text index?

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The Loki Ring: Scaling Without a Central Leader

12 August 2026

I have been studying Grafana Loki’s architecture, and this is the third post in the series. In the first post, the focus was labels, streams, and chunks. In the second post, we traced a log line’s path through the distributors and ingesters. Now, the core question is: how does Loki decide which ingester gets which log stream, and how does it scale that decision without a central coordinator?

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The Life of a Log in Grafana Loki

28 July 2026

I have been studying Grafana Loki’s write path, and this is the second post in the series. In the first post, the main idea was that Loki indexes labels, groups log lines into streams, and stores the log content in compressed chunks.

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Understanding Grafana Loki: Labels, Streams, and Chunks

21 July 2026

This is the first post in a series where I am studying Grafana Loki’s architecture from the ground up: why it exists, how logs move through the system, how the ring distributes work, how storage is organized, and how queries run without indexing every log line.

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Understanding the Gossip Protocol

13 July 2026

I have been studying how distributed systems keep track of their members, and the Gossip Protocol is one of those ideas that explains how a cluster can share information without placing a central coordinator in the middle of every decision.

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