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By default Docker limits neither the CPU nor the RAM of a container: a single one can exhaust the whole server. In Compose you bound them with deploy.resources.limits (cpus, memory) or the mem_limit and cpus shortcuts, and you control logs with the local driver, which rotates at 20 MB and 5 files by default.
Vector is the Datadog observability agent, written in Rust with its own transformation language VRL. Typically 30-100 MB memory, handling logs, metrics, and traces from dozens of sources. The right choice when pipelines are too complex for Fluent Bit and a modern alternative to Logstash.
OpenTelemetry declared logs signals stable in July 2024. The third pillar of modern observability finally joins metrics and traces under a single protocol and a shared data model.
Fluent Bit is the CNCF's lightweight log collector: a ~1.5 MB C binary that rarely tops 30 MB of memory in production. It beats Promtail, Vector, and Filebeat when several destinations or resource-constrained nodes are in play, thanks to a pipeline of inputs, parsers, filters, and outputs that stays easy to reason about and debug.
Loki indexes only labels, not log content, which cuts storage costs dramatically compared to Elasticsearch. The main production risk is cardinality explosion each unique label-value combination generates a stream that inflates the index and slows queries. Separating read and write paths ensures a heavy query cannot saturate ingestion.
OpenTelemetry is the CNCF project, graduated in May 2026, that unifies logs, metrics, and traces under one SDK and the OTLP protocol, without locking you into a single backend. Traces have been stable since 2021 and metrics since 2023; logs are still maturing, but already worth adopting on new projects.
