Loggly: a great Commercially-Oriented Log Shipping / Filter Pipeline, that will add value to your Company DevOps Department
March 27, 2019
Loggly: a great Commercially-Oriented Log Shipping / Filter Pipeline, that will add value to your Company DevOps Department
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Loggly
While Loggly is not technically open-source, it is a modern platform for log-file analysis. Oftentimes, in our projects we will acquire competing DevOps stacks, in order to evaluate their effectiveness for us. Our criteria is usually very simple: 1. Does it work? 2.) Does it work on Linux? 3.) Does it use .config file format, or similar plaintext config files? (we generally try to stay away from XML-based file formats, or proprietary formats (think: binary), due to the overhead, and complexity that we feel does not work for us) 4.) is it modern? (i.e. if there is a UX component to the project, does it employ web-standards, such as NodeJS, HTML5, Angular, et. al) 5. It is open-source friendly? (i.e. is it built with Open Source tools, or is the Licensing less restrictive than Microsoft EULA?) Technical difficulty is almost never a concern for my team.
- Modern: Loggly is modern: Dashboards, realtime information and the ability speak many different data sources and environments makes it an attractive choice
- Configurability: Loggly gets log parsing right: by allowing you to in real time- filtering of log data, tagging and identifying data sources
- DevOps friendly: Loggly is very Componentized: You can have an instance of Loggly running that will Monitor your Linux instance, in addition to all of it's services, as an example. Also, you can start/stop Loggly, without affecting your other components
- Commodity: Loggly is protected by the company's need to convert Loggly into a retail product. While this is fine for the Company, it may limit individual developers from having immediate access to a product they would otherwise adopt. Therefore, Loggly really is geared towards Companies and Commercial Entities
- Feature creep: Loggly stands in competition with other packages that are open-sourced. And while this is not bad from a Commercial view point (every needs to eat, right?), it almost automatically makes it a 2nd place package, without adding in a killer feature that adds additional value to Developers and DevOps Analysts
- Parsing: Sometimes, when working with other packages, you get used to a configuration format. Loggly is not so dissimilar that it's hard to read / write, but it's not a one-to-one with say, Logstash. This is more of an annoyance than a real problem, and if you include putting your files into a Repo, then this is even less an annoyance.
- (Positive, actually!) Cost of Acquisition: Loggly is not OpenSource (i.e. Free in this case). Therefore, while you have a cost up front, you have a wealth of support from the people that built it, which can translate into Time savings and/or bringing contractors on-board just for augmentation purposes
- Negative: Loggly covers a lot of the features that other Open Source Projects cover. That being said, it's regulated by supply and demand, and thus it has a certain "desirability" as a commercial (and therefore stable) project. As a result, unless you are an employee working in a company that sees Loggly as a necessary tool, you will probably not be exposed to it on your own
- (Positive): Tagging of information, and filtering of logs makes this product worthwhile from a commercial perspective: You can train your employees, and have them filtering logs in a day. If they get stuck, you don't have to pull internal resources away to support them, you simply open a ticket with Loggly.