A solid solution to log overload
January 11, 2019
A solid solution to log overload
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Loggly
Our organization uses Loggly both for our own internal systems as well as for the websites and services that we provide our clients. We funnel all log-type output from every conceivable place into Loggly, and it allows us to search, filter, correlate events, and receive alerts when bad things start to happen. It's become one of our most valuable troubleshooting tools, as well as an increasingly-preventative measure before or as problems arise.
- Collects logs from pretty much any place you can imagine. Many applications have Loggly integration, many programming languages have Loggly libraries, and pushing other logs into Loggly is easily scriptable and automatable.
- Searching and filtering is incredibly deep, and often very intuitive. You can drill down through any data set, filtering or searching on any value within that data set.
- Saved graphs and dashboards are a great way to visualize what's happening without having to read through each log entry.
- Loggly has a significant learning curve to figure out how to use it. At first, it can be daunting staring at a collection of thousands and thousands of logs wondering how you're supposed to make sense of any of it. The initial onboarding and training experience could be better in my opinion.
- Loggly's user interface is adequate but does have some room for improvement in my opinion. It is a collection of tools which work well on their own, and which do tie into each other in many ways, but it doesn't feel like there is a good, cohesive, overall workflow to the application. This is a bit vague, but I feel like it needs more of a concept of a "user dashboard" when you log in providing an overview of things like important/flagged recent log entries, detected anomalies, recently tripped alerts, perhaps links to your favorite or most common/recent graph dashboards.
- There is always room for more integrations and more ways to pull/collect logs. I would love to see Loggly offer a service which periodically pulls updated logs via SFTP, without the need for me to set up an intermediate shell script on a timer.
- Loggly has allowed us to solve some very complex and non-obvious problems through its correlations and filtering/searching ability across all of our log sources. Saving time diagnosing issues has provided a positive ROI on our Loggly costs.
- Loggly has allowed us to proactively discover issues before our clients do. Every time that happens, it's helping our reputation and in turn ensuring our customers continue to look to us when they have a need and recommend us to their associates.
- Loggly has allowed team members to always know where to go when we need to find logs, which is a huge time saver. Additionally, it allows other team members to help troubleshoot issues who might not have access to the individual systems that the logs reside on, freeing up system admins for other tasks.
We chose Loggly because we found it to be a good balance between costs, functionality, and available documentation/integrations. Logentries and PaperTrail were pretty closely tied for second place at the time. All 3 of the main contenders have been bought out by other companies since my initial evaluation. I haven't noticed any issues with Loggly since then, but I can't really say how the other services have been affected by changing ownership.