Loggly is good
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Loggly
We are a small startup that makes training and marketing software. Our platform is our entire business, and we use Loggly for a few things:
* Aggregating all of our logs.
* Deriving metrics from our logs.
* Sending alerts to our team when those metrics change in some way that matters to us.
* Aggregating all of our logs.
* Deriving metrics from our logs.
* Sending alerts to our team when those metrics change in some way that matters to us.
Pros
- Putting our logs in one place and making them searchable. We use AWS, and CloudWatch has always been a little frustrating in this regard (though it has gotten better recently).
- Deriving metrics from our logs. I think log-based metrics is such a good idea because your logs are the ultimate source for truth in regards to what the hell is going on inside your app. I have really loved the simplicity with which I can just count certain statements and call that a metric because just through the normal course of development certain log statements just naturally become a straightforward recording of an event having occurred.
- Alerts. I actually have a few complaints about email alerts, but just the way I was able to set them up so easily has been huge. Since we started using Loggly, there have been at least 3 bugs that Loggly exposed that were frankly very bad. And withoutt Loggly or without a user reporting them, we would have never known they were happening! This is stuff I tried to set up in CloudWatch in various ways, but because of my own ignorance or perhaps the complexity/limitations of CloudWatch (or the complexity of my stack?), I wasn't getting the information that I needed until I was able to just tell Loggly to send me an email whenever the word "error" showed up.
Cons
- I would love the ability to able to suppress a particular "event" instead of an entire alert. For example, sometimes an error is caught and handled but the word "error" is still printed to the logs. It would be nice if I could mark an event as "handled" without suppressing the entire alert for n minutes- if I do that then I would miss a real error that happened in that window. Also if I have my alerts set to run every minute checking the last five minutes, I will get 5 emails. It would be nice if there was some de-duplication. I have actually considered setting up webhooks into some API of my own instead of just emails to do this.
- I find the query language to be a little cumbersome. I suspect this is something you guys inherited from whatever index you use, but things like the __exists__ flag are strange. If I just type something into the field I am often surprised that I have to put quotation marks in (instead of it just searching for the term I supplied without any advanced features).
- Derived fields sometimes frustrate me, especially when I am using regex. I will sometimes create regexes that work in a test bed but do not work in Loggly. It is frustrating that I always have to match the beginning and the end of the string.
- The dashboards can be frustrating, especially when I am just trying to put a single number metric in a chart. I should be able to create a chart with multiple metrics: multiple charts with a single metric in each takes up a ton of space and limits the usability of the dashboard
- Loggly has alerted us to several bugs, ranging from major to small to "would have been a major problem under load."
- It's great having our disparate logs collected and the alerts we have set up around them let us know recently that somebody used an incorrect document to generate a mass email. Users were trying to log in with the link provided but getting 401s and I have an alert configured to tell me about high numbers of 4xx errors.
- Metrics and alerts around metrics have given us peace of mind that automated fulfillment systems aren't going off the rails and costing us hundreds of dollars.
Do you think SolarWinds Loggly delivers good value for the price?
Not sure
Are you happy with SolarWinds Loggly's feature set?
Yes
Did SolarWinds Loggly live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of SolarWinds Loggly go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy SolarWinds Loggly again?
Yes
I honestly didn't shop around that much. I came from CloudWatch, which though it has been improving, was very frustrating when it came to just setting up a simple alarm when a specific log message is found, or extracting useful metrics from logs. Loggly was recommended to me by a business partner and the timing worked out when SolarWinds reached out to me and offered me a discount (we were extremely price sensitive at that time, like this rest of the world at the beginning of the pandemic).
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