Graylog

We use Graylog to centralize and organize log data from our many applications running in our environment. Applications running in different operational systems and technologies can be very tricky to analyze their behavior, and that's where Graylog comes with its magic! We built fully functional and customizable dashboards, which makes our job easier, and fast to find, accurate, and act on several bad working applications in our environment.

• Positive: easy to deploy
• Positive: rich data display in graphs and big numbers
• Negative: uses a lot of disk space

Prometheus, Grafana and Zabbix

NGINX, Portainer, Grafana, Zabbix, SolarWinds Pingdom, SolarWinds Serv-U, Hyper-V

We are an ecommerce agency and, with multiple clients and multiple environments per client, having a centralized platform to collect log makes our life a lot easier. Instead of waiting for a developer or devops worker to check for issues, project managers can check the log themselves and then forward tasks quickly.

• Saves time of devops personal
• Allow quickier response time on issues
• More precise task attribution by project managers

blackfire.io and Sentry

blackfire.io, New Relic, Termius

• Full return on investment for the free version.
• Paid features aren't fully justifiable at the enterprise cost.

IBM QRadar, Splunk Enterprise Security, AlienVault OSSIM and AlienVault USM

Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series, Palo Alto Networks GlobalProtect Mobile Security Manager, Palo Alto Networks URL Filtering PAN-DB

Allows insight into logs from various systems and products that would otherwise be time consuming to access and identify. Dashboards can be customised to your preferences and Alerts/emails can be defined when specific events or patterns occur, which is not possible directly from the log source. Our use case is primarily security related looking at access/sign-in logs from various platforms and then sending alerts as required.

• Multiple log sources
• Customisable Dashboards
• Event alerts/emails

• Able to offer monitoring services to new and existing clients to increase revenue
• Staff have increased billing percentage
• Potential to expand security services

M‑Files, Microsoft Azure Active Directory, Windows Server

We have more than 60 applications, ranging from websites, Winforms, windows services, API's and console executables. All of them need to log their tracing and/or error information to a central location. It needs to be central because you don't want to search for this location, especially when you only have 5 minutes to solve a problem. We used to have a dedicated database for logging, but this does not eliminate the time lost searching for "the" logs. Also, [the] configuration used to be a manual and self-made business that wasn't always clear. Graylog is a dedicated logging solution that comes "out of the box" and is made accessible through a well-known plugin architecture (log4net if you're developing with the .NET framework).

• Central (the fact that it's central), one place to log them all
• Multiple ways to log, one I already mentioned (log4net)
• AD support
• The fact that it's free

• Negative: None. There is no negative impact by using Graylog.
• Speed of solving bugs. Logging is so accessible and easy to search that we spend a lot less time [searching] for specific errors.
• Better health of applications. Since monitoring the logs is so easy, it's very easy to keep an eye on the tracing to see if things are going smoothly and according to plan.

Azure Monitor

Azure API Management, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Data Factory