Top 9 Log Monitoring Tools – 2018 Update

Simply allowing logs to take up disk space, reviewing them only after something has happened and deleting logs when you run low on disk space are all the strategies of an admin doomed to always being in firefighting mode, reacting to bad things when they happen.

You know that event log monitoring is important, since all your systems and key applications log data. But since no two systems log to the same place, or in the same format, it’s almost impossible to get ahead of the logging and actually pay attention to what is being logged.

Here we’ve listed down the top 9 tools which are best for Log Monitoring and Collection are as follows:

1. Fluentd

Fluentd is an open source data collector for unified logging layer. Fluentd allows you to unify data collection and consumption for a better use and understanding of data.

Features –

a) Fluentd tries to structure data as JSON as much as possible: this allows Fluentd to unify all facets of processing log data: collecting, filtering, buffering, and outputting logs across multiple sources and destinations (Unified Logging Layer).
b) Fluentd has a flexible plugin system that allows the community to extend its functionality.
c) Fluentd is written in a combination of C language and Ruby, and requires very little system resource.

Official Website – https://www.fluentd.org/
Download Fluentd – https://www.fluentd.org/download
View on Github – https://github.com/fluent/fluentd
Documentation Link – https://docs.fluentd.org/

2. Apache Flume

Apache Flume is a distributed, reliable, and available service for efficiently collecting, aggregating, and moving large amounts of log data. It has a simple and flexible architecture based on streaming data flows. It is robust and fault tolerant with tunable reliability mechanisms and many failover and recovery mechanisms. The system is centrally managed and allows for intelligent dynamic management. It uses a simple extensible data model that allows for online analytic application.

View on Github – https://github.com/cloudera/flume
Official Link – https://cwiki.apache.org/FLUME/
User Guide – http://flume.apache.org/FlumeUserGuide.html

3. Graylog

Graylog is a centralized logging solution that allows the user to aggregate and search through logs. It provides a powerful query language, a processing pipeline for data transformation, alerting abilities and much more. It is fully extensible through a REST API. It also allows you to search and visualize the logs in a web interface.

Official Website – https://www.graylog.org/
Download Link – https://www.graylog.org/downloads
Documentation Link – http://docs.graylog.org/
View on Github – https://github.com/Graylog2

4. LogEntries

Logentries is an easy-to-use, self-hosted log management and analytics service for teams of all sizes. Logentries is the leading real-time log management and analytics service built for the cloud, making business insights from machine-generated log data easily accessible to development, IT and business operations teams of all sizes. With the broadest platform support and an open API, Logentries brings the value of log-level data to any system, to any team member, and to a community of more than 35,000 worldwide users.

Official Website – https://logentries.com/
Documentation Link – https://docs.logentries.com/docs/get-set-up

Logentries is free for as long as you want, with access to all premium features for 30-days!

5. Loggly

Loggly is a cloud-based log management and analytics service provider based in San Francisco, California. Loggly makes it easy to access and evaluate the mission-critical information within your logs. The Loggly service integrates into the engineering processes of teams employing continuous deployment and DevOps practices to reduce MTTR, improve service quality, accelerate innovation, and make better use of valuable development resources. They also offer an alternative to traditional, search-based log analysis by structuring and summarizing your log data before you ask it to.

Official Website – https://www.loggly.com/
Documentation Link – https://www.loggly.com/docs-index/

6. Logstash

Logstash is part of the Elastic Stack along with Beats, Elasticsearch and Kibana. Logstash is an open source, server-side data processing pipeline that ingests data from a multitude of sources simultaneously, transforms it, and then sends it to your favorite “stash.”.

Official Website – https://www.elastic.co/products/logstash
Documentation Link – https://www.elastic.co/guide/index.html
View on Github – https://github.com/elastic/logstash

7. Stackify

Stackify is a developer-friendly solution that fully integrates application performance management with error and log management. Stackify Retrace is a cloud based solution that fully integrates application performance tools with metrics error tracking and log management. With Retrace, developers and dev teams can easily monitor, detect and resolve application issues, before they affect the business to ensure a better end user experience.

Official Website – http://stackify.com
Documentation Link – https://support.stackify.com/
View on Github – https://github.com/stackify

8. Statsd

A network daemon that runs on the Node.js platform and listens for statistics, like counters and timers, sent over UDP or TCP and sends aggregates to one or more pluggable backend services (e.g., Graphite).

View on Github – https://github.com/etsy/statsd/

9. Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic is a cloud-based log management and analytics service that leverages machine-generated big data to deliver real-time IT insights.

Official Website – https://www.sumologic.com/
Documentation Link – https://help.sumologic.com/

Papertrail is a frustration-free log management tool that allows you to instantly manage logs from different servers.

With Papertrail, you can consolidate your logs in one place with a cloud-hosted log management service that takes typically only minutes to set up. Powerful. Quickly diagnose and fix customer problems, error messages, app server errors, and slow DB queries with full visibility across all logs.

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