For any production environment, having a proper logging and monitoring system is vital. This is down to the fact that downtime can lead to unwanted bottlenecks in such an environment and even loss of business reputation and revenue. As a result, most organizations that utilize DevOps principles and tools require a logging system to cover the shortcomings of Prometheus, which is an efficient production system monitoring tool but lacks logging capabilities. 

Grafana Loki is one of the tools that help companies maintain a centralized logging system. The importance of having a centralized logging system in a production environment is that it allows you to address issues such as downtime and identify potential issues that need resolution. Loki started at Grafana Labs in 2018 and was announced at the KubeCon in Seattle in December 2018. In June 2019, the first beta version 0.1.0 was released.