I’m curious to know what makes the Loki installation process so painful.

I’m interested in learning more about the software installation experience.

Only problematic thing might be relatively frequent storage changes (like they like to deprecate primary storage driver), otherwise its IMHO easy to setup. I'm running it on several projects, because it doesn't needs beefy machine like Elastic or even ClickHouse.

genuinely wondering if https://multiplayer.app would work for you.

note: I'm part of the Multiplayer team.

Thanks! Telescope is more focused on displaying logs and providing access to them rather than handling log ingestion. In the future, I plan to support various sources like Docker, k8s, and files to improve the local development workflow. However, it's unlikely that Telescope will support fetching logs from remote servers via SSH, as that's not its primary use case.

Graylog is a pretty standard solution to your problems (I believe), although they've been closing down their licensing more and more as time goes on.

I'm author of Logdy: https://logdy.dev/ https://github.com/logdyhq/logdy-core It comes as a precompiled binary you can download/deploy on the server and use to browse larger log files. I suggest you take a look!

I'd recommend VictoriaLogs and shipping to via Vector

I also recommend to not hesitate to use other log shippers as well as VictoriaLogs support ingestion not only from Vector - see https://docs.victoriametrics.com/victorialogs/data-ingestion...

If all you want is the plaintext logs, there's no need to bother with special products. Just point syslog in the right direction as if it was 1995. Everything can log to syslog already. Things like Splunk, Graylog and Kibana are mostly for visualization and query interfaces.