Splunk's Log Observer reduce time troubleshooting. The live Tail allows SREs and developers to filter and watch critical logs without having to learn a query language.
Perfect for projects where Elasticsearch makes sense: if you decide to employ ES in a project, then you will almost inevitably use LogStash, and you should anyways. Such projects would include: 1. Data Science (reading, recording or measure web-based Analytics, Metrics) 2. Web Scraping (which was one of our earlier projects involving LogStash) 3. Syslog-ng Management: While I did point out that it can be a bit of an electric boo-ga-loo in finding an errant configuration item, it is still worth it to implement Syslog-ng management via LogStash: being able to fine-tune your log messages and then pipe them to other sources, depending on the data being read in, is incredibly powerful, and I would say is exemplar of what modern Computer Science looks like: Less Specialization in mathematics, and more specialization in storing and recording data (i.e. Less Engineering, and more Design).
The query language is relatively easy and flexible when looking into an application's problems. These queries can then be used for alerts, reports, and dashboards. I believe Splunk is a platform that can help a system grow into its proactive application management, using incidents to add insights as needed without trying to work out every scenario in advance.
Logstash design is definitely perfect for the use case of ELK. Logstash has "drivers" using which it can inject from virtually any source. This takes the headache from source to implement those "drivers" to store data to ES.
Logstash is fast, very fast. As per my observance, you don't need more than 1 or 2 servers for even big size projects.
Data in different shape, size, and formats? No worries, Logstash can handle it. It lets you write simple rules to programmatically take decisions real-time on data.
You can change your data on the fly! This is the CORE power of Logstash. The concept is similar to Kafka streams, the difference being the source and destination are application and ES respectively.
Since it's a Java product, JVM tuning must be done for handling high-load.
The persistent queue feature is nice, but I feel like most companies would want to use Kafka as a general storage location for persistent messages for all consumers to use. Using some pipeline of "Kafka input -> filter plugins -> Kafka output" seems like a good solution for data enrichment without needing to maintain a custom Kafka consumer to accomplish a similar feature.
I would like to see more documentation around creating a distributed Logstash cluster because I imagine for high ingestion use cases, that would be necessary.
You can use table-like functionality to generate dashboards, but these queries are heavy on the system.
It could be easier to give insight into what type of line parsing is used for specific documents in a company-managed environment and/or show ways to gain the insights needed.
I would like to see ways to anonymize specific data for shared reports without pre-formatting this in a dashboard on which reports could be based.
It gives access to data features for every level of users: from managers and executives to Analysts, each one with the correct level of observation and analysis.
MongoDB and Azure SQL Database are just that: Databases, and they allow you to pipe data into a database, which means that alot of the log filtering becomes a simple exercise of querying information from a DBMS. However, LogStash was chosen for it's ease of integration into our choice of using ELK Elasticsearch is an obvious inclusion: Using Logstash with it's native DevOps stack its really rational
To be honest, Datadog is very similar to Splunk and LogScale to a lesser degree, but it is just as good if you don't need too complex observability. Grafana is still growing and might reach the same level soon.
Positive: Learning curve was relatively easy for our team. We were up and running within a sprint.
Positive: Managing Logstash has generally been easy. We configure it, and usually, don't have to worry about misbehavior.
Negative: Updating/Rehydrating Logstash servers have been little challenging. We sometimes even loose data while Logstash is down. It requires more in-depth research and experiments to figure the fine-grained details.
Negative: This is now one more application/skill/server to manage. Like any other servers, it requires proper grooming or else you will get in trouble. This is also a single point of failure which can have the ability to make other servers useless if it is not running.
