Likelihood to Recommend SolarWinds Loggly is great for capturing and organizing logs from 3rd party sources such as NGINX. Without SolarWinds Loggly it's really difficult to manage the logs overtime, find traffic patterns, and identify issues before they become a problem. Anyone who is routinely searching through massive log files could quickly benefit from the SolarWinds Loggly and it's capabilities.
Read full review Pros: Splunk is very well suited if you have multiple log sources of related data. All of them can be correlated and tasks can be automated based on the requirement. Other than alerts, Splunk can also run a specific script of your choice, based on some defined conditions. Cons: If you have a few logs but a large number of log sources, Splunk can be very expensive.
Read full review Pros Putting our logs in one place and making them searchable. We use AWS, and CloudWatch has always been a little frustrating in this regard (though it has gotten better recently). Deriving metrics from our logs. I think log-based metrics is such a good idea because your logs are the ultimate source for truth in regards to what the hell is going on inside your app. I have really loved the simplicity with which I can just count certain statements and call that a metric because just through the normal course of development certain log statements just naturally become a straightforward recording of an event having occurred. Alerts. I actually have a few complaints about email alerts, but just the way I was able to set them up so easily has been huge. Since we started using Loggly, there have been at least 3 bugs that Loggly exposed that were frankly very bad. And withoutt Loggly or without a user reporting them, we would have never known they were happening! This is stuff I tried to set up in CloudWatch in various ways, but because of my own ignorance or perhaps the complexity/limitations of CloudWatch (or the complexity of my stack?), I wasn't getting the information that I needed until I was able to just tell Loggly to send me an email whenever the word "error" showed up. Read full review Real-time + Scheduled alerts - i-e you can set up alerts which are actively monitoring your logs Pretty good response time for search results. With our key/value logging, Splunk makes it blazing fast to query the data. Dashboards provide insights into historical data Love how Splunk indexes all of the data and provides keys to search on Read full review Cons Not all searches are intuitive. We have to use a log aggregating device to ship our logs to Loggly as our network devices can not connect on an encrypted protocol. I would prefer if we could use some sort of VPN-based connector to ship logs securely. Sometimes when drilled down, it can be difficult to fully reset a search term to back all the way out of a drill down. Read full review At times some queries can run slowly if indices are not on a portion of the query you use. Setup time initially can be difficult if your logs aren't stored in common locations or in a common way to write the log. Ability to ingest logs from different locations without having to change code to put logs in a certain place (pro and con). Searches can be a bit more difficult to look through if your log isn't pulled in a manner that is easy to read through splunk. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Management is not open to having an agent sending the data to the cloud instance.
Read full review We are using Splunk extensively in our projects and we have recently upgraded to Splunk version 6.0 which is quite efficient and giving expected results. We keep track of updates and new features Splunk introduces periodically and try to introduce those features in our day to day activities for improvement in our reporting system and other tasks.
Read full review Usability Loggly's easy setup, very good customer support, and intuitive interface make Loggly very easy to use. User access management is also very easy as we can tailor the experience for each of our developers to access the information they need without having to wade through other information. While there was a slight learning curve in how to view the logs the way some specifically wanted, everything was possible and quite easy to do.
Read full review You can literally throw in a single word into Splunk and it will pull back all instances of that word across all of your logs for the time span you select (provided you have permission to see that data). We have several users who have taken a few of the free courses from Splunk that are able to pull data out of it everyday with little help at all.
Read full review Reliability and Availability When properly setup and configured, Splunk is extremely reliable.
Read full review Support Rating The support team have been great when we have logged tickets or had issues, most of the time it is down to user training, however we have had a couple of bugs that they have been able to iron out for us.
Read full review Splunk maintains a well resourced support system that has been consistent since we purchased the product. They help out in a timely manner and provide expert level information as needed. We typically open cases online and communicate when possible via e-mail and are able to resolve most issues with that method.
Read full review Online Training The online course was simple clear and described the main capabilities of the solution. There is also an initial module that can be done for free so anyone can familiarize themselves with the functionality of this solution. On the other hand, however, there could be more free online courses. Maybe even with a certificate, this would broaden the group of people who are familiar with the platform while increasing familiarity with the solution itself.
Read full review Implementation Rating It has good architecture, which focus on ese of use.
Read full review Smooth without too many major issues.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We were using
Zabbix . While it is an open-source solution that you can install for free the following things were limitations of the solution. 1) The scale and uptime of the solution are now your own problem. Since we were hosting at AWS this meant we still had a cost of the AWS solution. 2) The product is complicated from a configuration standpoint. In order to get anything meaningful out of it, you had to invest a lot of time and effort. We did consider NewRelic. I have experience with that product and do think that it is a solid alternative. Ultimately experience with the simplicity and speed of deployment with Loggly encouraged me to suggest using this again.
Read full review I wanted to learn a new language that I can quickly master and implement. Splunk is easy, fun to use and best of all, it can be developed in hours not days or weeks. Splunk is fundamentally a programming language that is minimal but yet powerful enough to collect, analyze and visualize data.
Read full review Scalability Splunk can scale in to the petabyte per day range which of course is awesome
Read full review Return on Investment Unfortunately, we hit our logging cap on a weekly basis and we lose logs after that. We have lost logs after hitting the maximum during service outages. We have become accustomed to not being able to rely on having them, then things go poorly. Read full review Overall very positive. It has provided visibility to what is going on within our network. One drawback is the time it takes to get up to speed with the application, but this is up to the user, and Splunk education is excellent. In my field, IT Security, there are few other friends to have in your back pocket better than Splunk. They are just that good. Read full review ScreenShots SolarWinds Loggly Screenshots