Grafana Explore author here: just posted my slides from the announcement talk [1] that hopefully clarifies a bit on what it is. Re splunk, depends what features you rely on. Loki is a no-frills log aggregation. Would be great to hear what features are needed for you. Feel free to write to me at david at grafana or open an issue.

[1] https://speakerdeck.com/davkal/on-the-path-to-full-observabi...