That's a lot slower at scale than something like Loki.

I feel you. The problem with a lot of Elastic style document search engines is that they don't ever let you search by very explicit terms because of how the index is built. I believe the pros outweigh the cons but I often wish I could "drop into" grep, less, and others from within the log aggregation tool.

The problem is that they're all on different servers. Once you use log aggregation stuff like DataDog, Splunk, or Kibana you get it, but before it's hard to see the benefits. Stuff like being able to see a timestamp of when an error first appeared and then from the same place see what other stuff happened around the same time.