Item: SolarWinds Loggly
Rating: 9
Author: TONY HINES

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Loggly

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Loggly as a syslog digest. Normally it is an after-the-fact tool for outages and anomalies. Syslog is an invaluable tool when troubleshooting outages and errors. As we experience outages we go back and sift through Loggly to see what the messages looked like at the event time and create alerts based on them to catch the problems in advance the next time. As a secondary method of catching issues before they become problems, we monitor the gross volume of messages daily. When they spike on a given day we know that something is up and go and find the offending source. Many times we catch the problem before it causes a customer impact event.

Pros and Cons

Pros

syslog digest
alerts based on syslog contents
sanity check on number of daily log events
post mortem on outages

Cons

the interface could be more intuitive
repetitive syslog dialog could either be highlighted or ignored by user choice
when a source spikes it's name could be included in the volume alert email

Return on Investment

decrease diagnosis time
increase security
aids with preemptive alerts
forensics at the finger tip
exposes syslog to the entire team

Alternatives Considered

Loggly is all in one window and much easier to search. Any string of text can be used to create alert traps.

Key Insights

Do you think SolarWinds Loggly delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with SolarWinds Loggly's feature set?

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

Other Software Used

Windows Server, Ubuntu Linux, N-able N-central

Likelihood to Recommend

Loggly is a great resource initially to post-mortem your errors and outages. After identifying the respective log events it can help you set alerts to keep you ahead of the game next time. When a box experiences a hard failure it can take days to recover the local syslog for troubleshooting but Loggly already has the messages. It greatly reduces time and even increases security since my team only needs Loggly access and not CLI-level authentication on all my servers. Overall, Loggly saves time, increases security, alerts me before my customers see the issues, and always provides the forensics needed to identify the root cause of an outage.

Comments

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Centralized data for post mortem to detect the next calamity before it happens