When it comes to observability there's never going to be an easy solution.

Loki is pretty simple so not sure what you're expecting.

There's always an ELK stack but I feel like that's a lot more overhead than a grafana/loki combo.. I personally never want to use this again but it's up to you.

You just need something to collect and ship the logs (promtail, fluentbit, opentelemetry), something to store them (loki, logstash), and some way to query them (grafana, kibana, logcli).

Give OpenObserve a try, it's able to handle a lot of traffic while using low resources. https://github.com/openobserve/openobserve

Did you check out the Loki Docker plugin for the daemon? That worked like a charm for me.

Promtail will grab host level logs as well.

DM if you’re comfortable with Ansible; I have the whole stack (host + Docker services) automated and can share.

Google "Application Performance Monitoring tools". Signoz is one, for example. Combines logs, metrics, and traces. There's also OpenObserve. I use Uptrace, but in terms of metrics visualisation it's very barebones, just gauges basically. All of them can be setup with docker.

Graylog. Super easy to set up. Getting the grok and regex patterns sorted kind of sucks for getting fields to be pulled out unless you are good with that already.

For security monitoring I'll throw Wazuh in the room. There's a room right recent video from John Hammond on the subject.