Logz.io in Boston offers their enterprise-grade log analytics application, oriented towards providing data security and eliminating the need for capacity management.
$0.84
per ingested GB 3 day of log retention
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft BI is a business intelligence product used for data analysis and generating reports on server-based data. It features unlimited data analysis capacity with its reporting engine, SQL Server Reporting Services alongside ETL, master data management, and data cleansing.
$9.99
per user/per month
Pricing
Logz.io
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Editions & Modules
Log Management - Community
$0
1 day of log retention.
Log Management - Pro
$.92
per ingested GB. 7 days retention.
Distributed Tracing - Pro
$5
Per million spans.
Infrastructure Monitoring - Pro
$12
per month per 1000 time-series metrics.
Log Management - Enterprise
Custom
Cloud SIEM - Enterprise
from $1.49
per ingested GB. Price includes Logz.io Log Management
Logz.io is an effective solution if your alerting needs are fairly straightforward and you don't need long-term retention of logs with easy access. If being able to maintain easy access to logs longer than this is necessary, another solution might be better. If you need a high degree of precision with alerting triggers and the ability to suppress alerts, you will need to combine Logz.io with an integration to get this or you might consider a different solution.
Microsoft BI is well suited for Stream analytics, easy data integration, report creation and UI/UX designs (limited but what all available are great ones) Microsoft BI may be less appropriate for handling huge number of datasets and difficult queries. It may also be difficult for a company with heavy data.
The race to perfect gathering of Non-Traditional datasets is on-going; with Microsoft arguably not the leader of the pack in this category.
Licensing options for PowerBI visualizations may be a factor. I.e. if you need to implement B2C PowerBI visualizations, the cost is considerably high especially for startups.
Some clients are still resistant putting their data on the cloud, which restricts lots of functionality to Power BI.
Microsoft BI is fundamental to our suite of BI applications. That being said, Northcraft Analytics is focused on delighting our customers, so if the underlying factors of our decision change, we would choose to re-write our BI applications on a different stack. Luckily, mathematics are the fundamental IP of our technology... and is portable across all BI platforms for the foreseeable future.
I initially struggled trying to ensure the correct data was returned in the Kibana search, but I found it overall easy to use. Some of the UI is not as seamless as I'd expect, like changing the environment completely resets your search criteria and filters, which is annoying since it's a common use case to search something in multiple environments
The Microsoft BI tools have great usability for both developers and end users alike. For developers familiar with Visual Studio, there is little learning curve. For those not, the single Visual Studio IDE means not having to learn separate tools for each component. For end-users, the web interface for SSRS is simple to navigate with intuitive controls. For ad-hoc analysis, Excel can connect directly to SSAS and provide a pivot table like experience which is familiar to many users. For database development, there is beginning to be some confusion, as there are now three tool choices (VS, SSMS, Azure Data Studio) for developers. I would like to see Azure Data Studio become the superset of SSMS and eventually supplant it.
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) can drag at times. We created two report servers and placed them under an F5 load balancer. This configuration has worked well. We have seen sluggish performance at times due to the Windows Firewall.
Their support team is the best in the world! They supported us in most of the critical times and helped to resolve the issue in real time. Also their email support is well maintained and never a mail is missed unanswered. Kudos to the support team of logz.io for maintaining professionalism.
While support from Microsoft isn't necessarily always best of breed, you're also not paying the price for premium support that you would on other platforms. The strength of the stack is in the ecosystem that surrounds it. In contrast to other products, there are hundreds, even thousands of bloggers that post daily as well as vibrant user communities that surround the tool. I've had much better luck finding help with SQL Server related issues than I have with any other product, but that help doesn't always come directly from Microsoft.
I have used on-line training from Microsoft and from Pragmatic Works. I would recommend Pragmatic Works as the best way to get up to speed quickly, and then use the Microsoft on-line training to deep dive into specific features that you need to get depth with.
We are a consulting firm and as such our best resources are always billing on client projects. Our internal implementation has weaknesses, but that's true for any company like ours. My rating is based on the product's ease of implementation.
Logz.io is more affordable, less work to maintain, and has more features. It was an easy choice. After my last team had to manage their own ELK stack, this was a no brainer. It helps us be focused on our core competencies.
We have used the built in ConnectWise Manager reports and custom reports. The reports provide static data. PowerBI shows us live data we can drill down into and easily adjust parameters. It's much more useful than a static PDF report.
As a SaaS provider we see being able to provide self-service BI to our client users as a competitive advantage. In fact the MSSQL enabled BI is a contributing factor to many winning RFPs we have done for prospective client organisations.
However MSSQL BI requires extensive knowledge and skills to design and develop data warehouses & data models as a foundation to support business analysts and users to interrogate data effectively and efficiently. Often times we find having strong in-house MSSQL expertise is a bless.
