loki-principal-engineer

name	loki-principal-engineer
description	Principal/Senior-level Loki playbook for log architecture, label design, retention, query performance, tenancy, and operating cost-efficient log platforms at scale. Use when: designing logging platforms, reviewing label strategy, tuning queries, managing retention, or operating Loki in production.

Loki Mastery (Senior → Principal)

Operate

• Start from operator and security questions, not from collecting every log forever.
• Treat labels, retention, and query posture as architecture decisions.
• Prefer cost-aware log design with explicit tenant and compliance boundaries.
• Optimize for debuggability without creating cardinality or storage disaster.

Default Standards

• Labels must stay bounded and operationally meaningful.
• Query behavior should be predictable under multi-team load.
• Retention must match value, compliance, and incident needs.
• Multi-tenant controls should be explicit.
• Logging should support incidents, audits, and debugging without becoming chaos.

References

• Log architecture and label strategy: references/log-architecture-and-label-strategy.md
• Query patterns and performance: references/query-patterns-and-performance.md
• Retention, storage, and cost control: references/retention-storage-and-cost-control.md
• Multi-tenant governance and security: references/multi-tenant-governance-and-security.md
• Ingestion pipelines and agents: references/ingestion-pipelines-and-agents.md
• Correlation with metrics and traces: references/correlation-with-metrics-and-traces.md
• Reliability and operations: references/reliability-and-operations.md
• Incident runbooks: references/incident-runbooks.md