10 Best Cloud Logging Tools in 2024 (And 3 Open-source Options)

By 2025, 50% of the world’s data is projected to be stored in the cloud. That’s 100 Zettabytes or 1,099,511,627,776 GBs.

Currently speaking, 60% of all corporations’ data is stored in the cloud. This is all to say that the cloud is an important tool for businesses, and using a tool to help with cloud logging is almost unavoidable.

Cloud Logging allows you to centralize, aggregate, and manage logs from sources on the cloud. It allows you to collect, correlate, and analyze logs from all over your stack, identify bottlenecks, measure performance, and tweak the configuration.

This is all to say that having a logging tool in your arsenal to help you identify important metrics within your cloud is crucial for the security, longevity, and utilization of the data you have stored in the cloud.

What Cloud Metrics Should You Monitor?

Like most systems, the list of metrics that you can track with the cloud is extensive. Far too much to go over here. But, a few are essential for efficiency as far as workflow goes. So what are those important cloud metrics?

1. Requests per minute

Tracking requests per minute gives administrators valuable insight into how many requests the cloud receives. This can be used to make performance-driven decisions on when to increase the capacity of cloud resources, and when additional resources are not needed.

2. Time to acknowledge

Time to acknowledge refers to the time it takes for your cloud-based application to respond to a request. Tracking this time may help reveal some problems related to load balancers if they fail to forward the requests quickly enough. If the time to acknowledge is slow enough, it could also indicate that the application isn’t managed correctly, and it's having a hard time handling its requests.

To get the most out of this metric, it’s best to monitor and then compare time to acknowledge metrics for each cloud region/individual cloud that you have in use. Doing so will help you pinpoint latency issues that could be unique to one cloud or cloud region.

3. Response duration

Response duration refers to the time it takes for the application to respond to its request. This is a good indicator of whether or not your application has the resources it needs to handle the traffic. If the response duration is low, the cloud can keep up. If it’s high, you might consider allocating additional resources.

4. Error rates

Error rates refer to how often a request results in an error. Tracking error rates can not only give you valuable insight into the health of the cloud but the application it hosts.

5. Server/node availability

If your cloud environment is distributed, you should be tracking how many servers/nodes are available within your cluster as a percentage of your total servers deployed. A good rule of thumb here is that if the number of available servers falls below the 90% mark of the total deployed, it could indicate serious problems with your instances in your cloud server.

The Best Cloud Logging Tools in 2024

With the information above in mind, let’s take a plunge into the 10 best cloud logging tools in 2024.

1. Better Stack

Better Stack is a complete log management solution that allows you to collect, transport, analyze, monitor, store, and archive logs from all over your cloud architecture.

By offering integrations into stacks like Kubernetes, Heroku, Logstash, Rails, Docker, AWS, and more, you get an array of options for monitoring. Thanks to custom-built technology and data stored in ClickHouse, you can work with your logs more efficiently and save money. All the collected data is sent to Grafana for comprehensive visualization and more efficient intel management.

Better Stack allows you to query your logs the same way you'd query your database with SQL-compatible structured log management. Better Stack allows you to search & filter petabytes of logs in a moment and set an anomaly detection alert to receive alerts when your logs become out of the ordinary.

One of the greatest benefits of Better Stack is built-in collaboration features, where you can cooperate with your colleagues in a Google Docs-like environment, save, share, and archive parts of code, and collaborate with your colleagues.

Tighter security is one of the main benefits of log monitoring, and Better Stack itself is one of the most secure tools available. Using industry-standard best practices and cooperating only with data centers compliant with DIN ISO/IEC27001 certifications, your data is safe during both transit and storage.

🌟Key features

• Cloud log management
• Log management
• Uptime monitoring
• Comprehensive observability dashboards

➕Pros

• 30-second check frequency
• Incident Management and Status Pages built-in
• On-call scheduling
• Dozens of integrations with popular third-party platforms

➖Cons

• Not considered a full-stack observability solution
• Not yet as feature-rich as some of the larger, much older platforms in the space

💲Pricing

Better Stack Uptime and Logs both have free, basic packages available.

Premium packages for Logs start at just $25/month. This package comes with a 30GB allowance and 15 days of retention.

Uptime premium packages also start at just $25/month. This package comes with 50 monitors, 5 status pages, and built-in incident management.

Want to see more? You can check out our full range of packages by visiting the pricing page.

2. Sematext Cloud

Sematext Cloud offers a cloud logging solution within its monitoring platform. Sematext Cloud allows you to monitor Private, Public, and Hybrid Cloud services and easily integrates with most Cloud and Container Platforms.

It uses Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana for collecting and transforming data, searching, filtering, and analyzing, and finally, data managing and visualization. You can troubleshoot faster using real-time alerting on both metrics and logs.

Log analyzing and looking for anomalies make the whole process quicker. You can integrate it with email, PagerDuty, Slack, HipChat, BigPanda, OpsGenie, VictorOps, WebHooks, Nagios, Zapier, and more.

Sematext runs on AWS, an infrastructure that follows strict IT security best practices. Your logs are encrypted via HTTPS and sent through TLS/SSL channels. You can also restrict specific permissions to some members of your team.

Not a big fan of Sematext? Check out some similar tools to Sematext Logs.

🌟Key features

• Cloud monitoring
• Log management
• Infrastructure monitoring
• Synthetic monitoring
• Real user monitoring

➕Pros

• Full-stack monitoring
• Out-of-the-box dashboards
• Helpful support

➖Cons

• Expensive cost-per-GB for Logs
• User reviews complain about a lack of integrations with security tools
• User reviews complain about difficulties with user management
• Dashboard configurations are a little difficult to manage and use

💲Pricing

Sematext Logs offers a free, but very limited plan. It comes with only 500MB of data per day and 7 days of retention. This plan also limits the use of alerts extensively,

The paid logging plans start at $45 per month. This plan comes with 1GB of data per day, making the cost per GB pretty high. If you want more than 7 days of retention, you’ll have to fork out more, too.

If you want the helpful webhooks integrations, you’ll have to take a step up to the pro plan, which starts at $55 per month. Of course, if you want a longer data retention period or a larger data allowance each month, this will go up, too.

3. Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic offers a cloud logging platform as a part of its log management solution. Centralized data visualization allows you to spot developing trends and disarm any errors before they occur or during damage control, finding the root cause faster.

Thanks to anomaly detection, outlier detection, and predictive analytics, you get deep and comprehensive insights into your architecture's performance. Sumo logic offers real-time visibility into AWS, Azure, and GCP cloud applications and infrastructure. Alongside that, you get access to over 150 apps and native integrations to get full out-of-the-box visibility into third-party technologies.

Sumo Logic provides you with two dashboards - a live dashboard and an interactive one. The live dashboard offers numerous real-time data in the order they come. However, it doesn't provide an option to look back at the older data. That's where the interactive dashboard comes in. In the interactive dashboard, you can view a complete overview of events and trends, focus on the graphs, and identify rare events. You can filter for specific errors and exceptions to be able to focus on them in the future.

Not a big fan of Sumo Logic? Check out some similar tools to Sumo Logic.

🌟Key features

• Log management
• Infrastructure monitoring
• Application observability
• AWS monitoring
• Kubernetes monitoring

➕Pros

• Very versatile
• Powerful cloud log management solution
• Helpful support

➖Cons

• Very expensive cost per GB in log management
• User reviews complain about a complex setup process

💲Pricing

Sumo Logic offers a wide range of solutions, each with its own price. Logs and monitoring, however, start at $3 per GB. They do not elaborate on how that price scales, but they do offer a free trial.

It’s also worth noting that they have a separate solution for logs and monitoring AWS. This is still $3 per GB, and they still do not elaborate on how that price scales.

4. Loggly

Loggly offers a cloud logging service as a part of its Log management solution. Loggly is a SaaS-based cloud logging, aggregation, and analytics service from SolarWinds. You can forward logs to Loggly using Syslog and you can manage log aggregation using simple scripts. Loggly is a SaaS-based cloud logging service from SolarWinds.

It can work with txt based logs from any source and support multiple languages and platforms. We can find support for Ruby, Java, Python JavaScript, PHP, Apache HTTP Server, Tomcat, MySQL, Syslog, rsyslog, and many more. Loggly's primary focus is on solving and fixing operational problems. Customizable dashboards, documentation, and a vast array of useful tools make Loggly a powerful log-analyzing tool.

The only downside to Loggly has more to do with SolarWinds, and less to do with Loggly itself. SolarWinds is a massive corporation with an impressive toolbelt for observability. However, each one of these tools exists under its own URL, meaning that these tools don’t work together perfectly in unison. So, when you hear/see people talk about the SolarWinds ecosystem, it’s more like a collection of tools owned by the same organization.

Not a big fan of Loggly or SolarWinds? Check out some tools similar to Loggly.

🌟Key features

• Log management and analysis

➕Pros

• Simple, powerful tool
• Fast searching for massive amounts of data

➖Cons

• Very expensive per GB
• User reviews complain about limitations for downloaded events

💲Pricing

Loggly has 4 pricing options. The major differences, aside from the price, between these plans are the data allowances and retention periods.

The Lite package from Loggly is their free plan, offering just 200MB per day and 7 days of retention. This plan does not offer any sort of alerting, nor does it allow for customized dashboards.

The standard plan starts at a jarring $79 per month, and it only comes with 1GB per day. The retention period is increased to 15 days, and you do gain access to alerting and custom dashboards, but that’s a cost of $2.63 per GB.

Next, the Pro plan starts at $159 per month. This plan says that it comes with GB allowances up to 100GB per day, but they do not specify how much extra it will cost as you increase the allowance.

Finally, the Enterprise plan starts at $279 per month. This is by far their most feature-rich option, but the offer is very vague. The GB allowance is just listed as “custom”, and they do not offer any sort of guide as to how much you can expect to pay per GB.

5. Datadog

Datadog Log Management offers Logging without Limits - a solution for the collection, processing, storage, exploration, and monitoring of your logs. Their Log Explorer allows you to search, observe in real-time, analyze, spot patterns, and save views of your Logs.

You can collect metrics from your cloud services and visualize them in one place, using drag-and-drop customizable dashboards. Datadog also allows you to isolate query performance issues and eliminate hold-ups at the DBA level by managing multiple databases at once. Datadog's deployment is easy and quick and does not require any extensive training.

Datadog makes it even easier by offering out-of-the-box dashboards with drag-and-drop capabilities. Easy-to-read visualizations give you a jump start in exploring log patterns, drill deeper into troubleshooting issues, and automatically identify log anomalies.

Not a big fan of Datadog? Check out some similar tools to Datadog.

🌟Key features

• Log management
• Synthetic monitoring
• Real user monitoring
• Infrastructure monitoring
• APM
• SIEM

➕Pros

• Full-stack observability
• 20+ individual solutions
• Hundreds of integrations

➖Cons

• Extremely expensive
• Not designed for small businesses

💲Pricing

Since there are so many individual solutions in Datadog, it can be hard to grasp your monthly overhead if you’re using more than one solution. But, since we’re talking about log management, let’s take a deeper look at that price specifically.

Datadog charges $1.70 per million log events to both ingest and retain. To put this into perspective, 1GB of data can contain roughly 2-3 million log events. This puts 1GB of log data anywhere between $3.40 and $5.10 each month.

6. Papertrail

Papertrail is yet another cloud-based log management tool made by SolarWinds. You can use it to Aggregate logs, tail, and search using a browser, CLI, or API, create alerts, or integrate it with other SolarWinds products such as AppOptics.

Papertrail aggregates logs from multiple sources such as syslog, txt log files, Ruby on Rails, MySQL, Windows event, Cloud hosting, Tomcat, Apache, Heroku apps, and more.

You might be wondering what the differences between Loggly and Papertrail are. To simplify it, Loggly is described as “log management simplified in the cloud”, while Papertrail is described as “Hosted log management for servers, apps, and cloud services.”

Papertrail provides a web-based log viewer with powerful command-line tools and long-term archives that make cloud logging easier.

Not a big fan of Papertrail? Check out some similar tools to Papertrail.

🌟Key features

• Log management and analysis

➕Pros

• Multiple machines per host
• Customization to group and direct filter logs
• Fast log searching

➖Cons

• Very expensive per GB
• User reviews complain about a lack of advanced features

💲Pricing

Papertrail has a unique pricing structure in that the scale doesn’t make sense. It is very expensive per GB regardless, but, for example, the base plan is $7 per month, and it only comes with 1GB for the entire period. The next step up more than doubles to $18 per month, but the data allowance only goes up to 2GB for the whole period.

In fact, with each step, the cost per GB increases significantly, maxing out at the $230 plan, which only comes with 25GBs.

7. New Relic

New Relic's Log Management allows you to instantly search through logs, visualize them, use logging data to create custom charts, dashboards, and alerts, and troubleshoot any emerging issues within one platform. Log collection uses its infrastructure monitoring agent.

If you prefer to go agentless, you can forward Syslog data to a TCP endpoint. New Relic supports both on-premise and cloud data. New Relics benefits from machine learning to detect performance patterns, mark those logs, and create clusters based on correlations that are easy to query, visualize, analyze or use for alerting.

Visualization is handled by the Logs UI, allowing you to spot patterns that could benefit you in software tweaking or observing logs in context. Logs can be explored and manipulated using filters and parsing rules. Data is split into partitions to optimize query performance. Alerting options are available and help prevent any unwanted events.

Not a big fan of New Relic? Check out some similar tools to New Relic.

🌟Key features

• Full stack monitoring
• Log management
• Infrastructure monitoring
• Synthetic monitoring
• Real user monitoring
• Serverless monitoring

➕Pros

• Fast and lightweight
• Tons of integrations
• Dynamic reporting

➖Cons

• Expensive, per-seat pricing
• User reviews complain about poor documentation
• User reviews complain about a learning curve

💲Pricing

New Relic’s claim to fame is its transparent pricing, but the truth is that it’s almost the exact opposite of transparent. Instead of giving clear dollar amounts with upfront costs that are easy to understand, New Relic forces you to calculate it on your own (yes, they give you the formula on their pricing page) or contact sales.

Here’s the basic rundown, but the exact prices will depend on your needs, how many seats you need (and what kind of administrative access you want to give each seat), and how many add-ons you want.

New Relic for free for 1 full user. They give you 100GBs of data, unlimited querying, and Free Proactive Anomaly Detection. Beyond that, you will pay $0.25 for every extra GB past the free 100 GB, and $0.50 per incident event beyond your first 1,000.

That seems simple enough, but the real kicker is that you have to pay per seat. The cost of each seat depends on the limitations you want to give each user. For example, Core users are $49 per seat per month. These users are highly limited in the ways they can utilize the platform. If you want full access, “Full platform” users range from $99 to a staggering $658 per seat per month.

8. Mezmo (Formerly LogDNA)

Formerly known as LogDNA, Mezmo is a log management solution that allows you to collect and analyze logs from multiple sources. You can filter your logs based on app, host, or cluster, browse logs from any source instantly, and search through them with simple keywords, exclusion terms, chained expressions, and data ranges.

Alerts are set off based on either presence or absence, or generate an alert from a saved View and report on them in PagerDuty, Slack, or with a custom Webhook. Mezmo also allows you to save views to access common filters and searches and share them.

Mezmo is built on Elasticsearch, providing you with relatively fast and reliable indexing and filtering of your logs. A web-based GUI handles filtering, logs grouping by source, and more. Visualization and custom dashboards are also available, and you can work with user-specific logs. Agentless log collection via Syslog and HTTP(s) with full-text search and visualizations are available.

Not a big fan of Mezmo (LogDNA)? Check out some similar tools to Mezmo.

🌟Key features

• Log analysis
• Telemetry pipeline

➕Pros

• Simple and easy to implement
• Quick searching and filtering
• Thorough documentation

➖Cons

• No recent reviews online
• Cost per GB (based on data retention) is fairly expensive considering the limited features

💲Pricing

Mezmo offers a free plan, but it is extremely limited and doesn’t offer any data retention.

The paid plans all depend on the retention period and are charged per GB. With 3 days of retention, you’ll pay $0.80 per GB, 7 days is $1.05 per GB, 14 days is $1.30 per GB, and 30 days is $1.80.

They offer custom plans, but there are no pricing guidelines or limits mentioned.

9. Amazon CloudWatch Logs

Amazon Cloudwatch Logs is a solution that allows you to monitor, store, and access log files from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, AWS CloudTrail, Route 53, and more sources. Using Amazon CloudWatch Logs, you can query data using their purpose-built query language. It provides sample queries, command descriptions, query autocompletion, and log field discovery to ease onboarding.

Cloudwatch Logs can track the number of errors that occur in your application logs and send you a notification whenever any monitored rate exceeds a threshold.

Using CloudWatch Logs, you can create CloudWatch alerts, store logs for an unlimited amount of time, archive logs in highly durable storage, and access the raw log data.

CloudWatch Logs offers two log categories. Within the CloudWatch Logs Standard log category, log groups support all CloudWatch Logs features. In the CloudWatch Logs Infrequent Access log category, log groups have reduced ingestion costs and provide a subset of the capabilities available in the Standard category.

Not a big fan of CloudWatch? Check out some similar tools to CloudWatch.

🌟Key features

• Log management
• Application monitoring

➕Pros

• Realtime AWS monitoring
• Integrates with almost all AWS services
• Easy to set up
• User-friendly UI

➖Cons

• User reviews complain about huge cost incursions for large log groups
• User reviews complain about a lack of updates - claiming that other solutions are now much better options.
• User reviews complain about complex log group configurations

💲Pricing

The paid tier for Amazon CloudWatch Logs is extensive in its structure. The cost of ingestion, storage, queries, data protection, and live tail all completely depends on your region.

For example, if you select the US East (Ohio) region, your costs would be as follows:

However, if you swap to US West (California), your costs would look like this:

10. Google Cloud Logging

Google Cloud Logging is a fully managed log management solution enabling you to store, analyze and create alerts. Its Logs Explorer enables you to view logs from Google Cloud Services in the Console. Google Cloud Logging’s Log Analytics powered by BigQuery provides you with deep operational insights and Regional Log Buckets help you to stay compliant with both regional and industry regulations.

Google Cloud Logging allows you to ingest data from hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It uses the Cloud Logging API to receive log entries as they pass via the Log Router. The Log Router checks each log against existing filters to discard unnecessary noise. Its error reporting capacities automatically analyze your logs for abnormalities and exceptions and merge them into groups. Using Log buckets and views you can store your logs and thanks to Logs archival you can export your logs into Cloud Storage.

🌟Key features

• Log management

➕Pros

• Easy integration with Google services
• Easy searching and filtering

➖Cons

• Very few recent reviews online
• Pricing is not transparent
• User reviews complain about the UI being difficult to navigate

💲Pricing

Google Cloud Logging doesn’t offer much in terms of pricing online. They urge users to contact sales for any sort of quote and offer a very complex pricing calculator to help understand your budget.

However, they do mention online that you get $300 worth of credits for free when you sign up, which also gives you access to 20+ free tools.

Comparing the 10 Best Cloud Logging Tools

Top 3 Open-source Cloud Logging Tools

As you do your research on cloud logging tools, you’ll probably come across a few suggestions for open-source solutions. Typically, open-source tools, regardless of what they are, come with their own sets of pros and cons.

For starters, all open-source cloud logging solutions are free to use, but that doesn’t mean that they cost nothing. The cost of owning these tools (maintenance, updates, installations, etc.) can often outweigh the costs associated with SaaS solutions.

That said, if you’d like to give an open-source solution a shot, there are a few options to consider. Here are the top 3 open-source cloud logging solutions:

1. SigNoz

SigNoz is a decently powerful open-source platform for managing and analyzing logs, providing a centralized hub for gathering, storing, and analyzing log data. It was designed and created for organizations looking to gain more insight from their log data from their IT infrastructure.

SigNoz supports the aggregation of log data from a range of sources such as servers, network devices, applications, and cloud services. It utilizes OpenTelemetry for data collection and processing, which has quietly emerged as the global benchmark for instrumenting cloud-native applications.

🌟Key features

• Open-source log management

➕Pros

• Open-source
• Utilizes OpenTelemetry

➖Cons

• Cost of ownership can be expensive
• Very few reviews online

2. Logstash

Logstash is an open-source and free-to-use server-side data processing pipeline that can ingest data from multiple sources, transform it, and then send it to your database of choice.

Logstash is fairly lightweight, as it’s able to parse and process an extensive amount of log data while still maintaining impressive performance and scalability. It can output to multiple destinations and integrate with other ELK stack components with ease.

🌟Key features

• Open-source log management

➕Pros

• Lightweight
• Open-source
• Built-in security features

➖Cons

• Cost of ownership can be expensive

3. Graylog

Graylog is an open-source platform for log management and analysis, specifically designed to handle large volumes of log data from diverse sources. It runs on a pipeline system that efficiently collects, processes, and enhances data before storing it in a database. This stored data is easily accessible and searchable through the Graylog web interface, which offers a multitude of visualization options.

Aside from the strong data collection and processing capabilities, Graylog offers alerting functionality. When certain conditions are met, which are determined by you, alerts will trigger and notify you of the given issue.

Graylog also offers pretty seamless integration with third-party tools and platforms through its RESTful API. Overall, it’s highly scalable and capable of managing substantial log data loads by horizontally expanding its capacity through the addition of more Graylog server nodes to form a cluster.

🌟Key features

• Open-source log management

➕Pros

• Easy to integrate with third-party tools and platforms
• Open-source

➖Cons

• Cost of ownership can be expensive
• User reviews complain about Graylog’s dependency on Elasticsearch

Conclusion

There you have it! The top 10 cloud logging solutions on the market today. Plus, a few honorable, open-source mentions. If you’re still stuck on a decision, my advice would be to continue with your research, sign up for as many free trials as you can, and take your time. No article or “top 10” list can compare to actually getting your hands on these tools and testing them for yourself.

Article by

Jenda Tovarys

Jenda leads Growth at Better Stack. For the past 5 years, Jenda has been writing about exciting learnings from working with hundreds of developers across the world. When he's not spreading the word about the amazing software built at Better Stack, he enjoys traveling, hiking, reading, and playing tennis.

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