10 Best Dynatrace Alternatives to Explore in 2024

Introduction

Dynatrace offers Log Monitoring as a part of their platform. It allows you to create custom log metrics for smarter and faster troubleshooting and understanding logs in context. Their Log Management solution offers Log data analysis and alerting.

Dynatrace allows you to analyze log events across different parts of production and over longer periods of time. Dynatrace leverages artificial intelligence to correlate log messages and problems your monitors register. All of the data is used for root-cause analysis. You can also define custom rules and log metrics to receive notifications if any anomalies or passed thresholds occur.

Dynatrace offers two products, Log monitoring v1 and Log monitoring v2 modes and they offer different approaches to log management, whereas the v2 is considered by Dynatrace as newer. V2 removes issues with logs with unrecognized timestamps and offers a generic log data ingestion engine. However, a lot of features are still missing in the v2, such as sensitive info masking, UI configuration files on a host, or on-demand access to log files on the monitored host.

Dynatrace also offers a quite unique pricing model based on the Davis data units, also known as DDUs. Basically, each log record (line, message, entry) deducts 0.0005DDU from your available quota - 1 million log records multiplied by a DDU weight of 0.0005 consume a total of 500 DDUs.

Pros:

• Dynatrace offers an AI-assisted full-stack monitoring solution
• Log Monitoring v1 and v2

Cons:

• Pricing
• Quite difficult to grasp and can easily get more overwhelming than helpful
• Unfriendly UI

The Best Dynatrace Alternatives in 2023

Dynatrace offers a good solution for log management, but there is still a room for improvement. Let's take a look at the list of alternatives offering more friendly prices, easier onboarding, better design and more.

1. Better Stack

Better Stack is a complete log management solution from Better Stack, allowing 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, or AWS, and more, you get a broad 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 funds. All the collected data are 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.

Main Benefits of Better Stack:

• Better Stack offers competitive pricing and is extremely efficient thanks to a ClickHouse-based storage
• Integration with Better Stack Uptime, enabling even better observability
• Pricing starts at $0.25

2. Datadog

Datadog’s Log management allows you to gain complete visibility into cloud-scale infrastructure. It is capable of aggregating metrics and events from over 500 integrated technologies, tagging and storing them. Using Datadog’s Log Management, you can collect, search, and analyze logs, and then correlate them using specific traces, metric spikes, or security signals. Datadog also takes care of ingestion, normalization, and enrichment of logs.

Datadog’s Log management is also capable of identifying potential threats, discovering misconfiguration, and monitoring your logs using threshold and anomaly detection. On top of that, you can monitor the security of all layers of your cloud environment. Datadog tracks the performance impact of every code deployed and automatically maps data flows and dependencies with the service map.

Main Benefits of Datadog:

• Full-observability achievable
• Security monitoring capacities

3. Splunk

Splunk’s Log Observer is a log monitoring solution designed for DevOps. It allows you to integrate with the most popular data sources such as Kubernetes, Fluentd, or multiple AWS services. Splunk’s UI offers a point-and-click interface for rapid investigation of logs, which makes it easy to filter, sort, and explore data based on what you want to see at the moment. Log Observer also offers Live Tail features allowing you to observe and filter logs in real-time. Splunk is fast when searching for short-time data. However, it stays behind when getting data from a longer period of time, or when identifying trends.

Splunk’s log management is a part of the Observability Platform, a complete platform combining Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, RUM, APM, and On-Call. Splunk is an enterprise-ready solution that reflects mostly on its price. Log observer is billed in two ways. Your bill can be calculated based on the amount of data indexed, or indexed. You can try Splunk Cloud or Enterprise in a free trial period.

Main Benefits of Splunk Log Observer:

• Splunk’s Observability Platform
• Enterprise-focused solution

4. Dataset

After the acquisition of Scalyr, SentinelOne launched its own Log Management and Analysis solution - DataSet. It offers Real-Time Insights allowing you to search and analyze logs or Live Tail all data, and create contextual alerts based on anomalies detection. Dataset is a cloud-scale SaaS allowing you to scale as much as you need.

Dataset allows you to unify data from hybrid or multi-cloud deployments, which allows for comprehensive, cross-platform visibility. DataSet also allows you to monitor upstream Kubernetes and managed services such as Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, Google Cloud GKE, IBM IKS, Redhat OpenShift, and more.

Dataset also enables you to monitor performance, compliance, and security-related events in one platform. Dataset as of now does not offer regular subscription plans and to get it, you need to contact their sales team.

Main Benefits of Dataset:

• SentinelOne backing
• Enterprise Ready Solution

5. LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor offers log intelligence at scale for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Your data are centralized, correlated, and contextualized, with an emphasis on data hygiene and internal compliance. LogicMonitor allows you to centralize your monitoring, correlate relevant logs with metrics in a single platform.

It supports more than 2000 integrations, modules, and pre-built templates for on-premises and cloud infrastructures. LogicMonitor is truly user-friendly since it offers query options for all experience levels. It also allows you to access raw data up to 12 months old. Metrics, logs, and log anomalies are all associated with their corresponding devices, cloud instances, and containers.

LogicMonitor manipulates your data with machine learning tools, which decreases troubleshooting times and allows better workflow by sparing your engineers of unproductive tasks. Anomalies are automatically detected and contextualized for easier root cause analysis. LogicMonitor offers Full IT operations lifecycle support via integrations like ServiceNow, CMDB, and Ansible.

One of the biggest disadvantages is the need to communicate your subscription with a sales team. You need to get a custom quote.

Main Benefits of LogicMonitor:

• Heavy usage of automation and machine learning methods
• Suitable of all experience

6. Graylog

Graylog operates under multiple models. You can choose from either Graylog open - their open-source solution, Graylog Small Business, or Enterprise. The last option is Graylog cloud, offering the same experience as Graylog Enterprise, however, hosted on the cloud, saving you the funds needed for your own infrastructure.

Graylog offers a log management solution based on Elasticsearch and MongoDB, allowing you to centralize and collect logs from your infrastructure, explore them, trace errors, detect threats and analyze data in a comprehensible way. Graylog allows you to store older data on slow storage in case you’d need to re-import it for further analysis, create alerts based on logs correlation. Graylog also offers advanced anomaly detection features with pre-built security scenarios, risk models, and alerting and correlation engine. All of the data can be visualized using Graylog’s Log View Widget, which helps you to find patterns and track performance-related trends.

Thanks to Graylog's multiple deployment options, you can run and manage it on your own, or have it hosted, which gives you more flexibility and control.

Main Benefits of Graylog:

• Multiple deployment models available
• Open-source option available

7. Sematext

Sematext is a monitoring and logging service. It allows for centralized logging, so it provides you a way to aggregate and store logs from any data source in one location. You can collect data from servers, applications, databases, containers, systems, and more. Sematext allows you to use live time viewing of your logs as they arrive into the cloud from multiple data sources.

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 with real-time alerting on both metrics and logs. Log analyzing and looking for anomalies are used to 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, whose infrastructure follows strict IT security best practices. Your logs are encrypted via HTTPS and sent through TLS/SLL channels. On top of that, you can restrict specific permissions to some members of your team to increase the integrity and security of your service.

Main Benefits of Sematext:

• It brings infrastructure and application performance monitoring together with log management
• Easy to use with good pre-configured dashboards and reports thus also quick to start
• No need for a lengthy configuration;

8. LogDNA

LogDNA parses major log line types on ingestion and offers Custom Parsing Templates. 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. LogDNA also allows you to save views to access common Filters and Searches and share them.

LogDNA 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.

LogDNA's pricing packages depend on the retention period in days and the number of users. For starters, you can get LogDNA for free for one user and without any logs retention and unlimited saved views.

Main Benefits of LogDNA:

• Pay-as-you-go pricing model
• Well designed UI

9. Logz.io

Logz.io is based on open source tools. It is ELK-stack based, which promises performance and reliability, but for a price. Its crowdsourcing and machine learning features can help you discover otherwise invisible events. It also provides a live tail feature to observe data in real-time, providing you with an option to monitor and analyze data from multiple sources at once.

Using query language, you can create custom and flexible alerts to be the first one to know about any bugs, threats, or anomalies. Kibana's query language provides you with multiple more features such as identifying specific events, customizing alert formats, or grouping options by fields.

Logz.io provides a safe way to store your in-transit data with its support for SSL and AES 256-bit encryption.

You can get Logz.io for free. Their pricing starts at $0.92/month per ingested GB and 7 days retention. The pricing model depends on the retention period and volume of data ingested.

Main benefits of Logz.io:

• Based on open-source tools
• ELK-stack provides a wide array of tools and options
• Reasonable pricing model

10. Calyptia

Calyptia is an enterprise-ready log management tool based on the open-source tool Fluentd.

FlutentD is an open-source data collector unifying data collection and consumption enabling you to manage your logs in a more comprehensible and consistent way. Fluentd structures data as JSON as much as possible, allowing you to collect, filter, buffer, and output logs. It offers a flexible plugin system allowing its community to extend its use. Fluentd has a rich community developers community, which gave birth to more than 500 community-contributed plugins allowing you to connect dozens of data sources and data outputs.

Fluentd is written in a combination of C and Ruby, requires very little system resources (approximately 40MB of memory in the vanilla version), and offers an even more lightweight version - Fluent Bit. Nowadays, more than 2000 data-driven companies use Fluentd.

Main Benefits of Calyptia

• Community developed plugins
• Lightweight solution

Conclusion

This article brought you a closer look at Dynatrace and its log management solution. It discussed its strengths and weaknesses and then proposed a list of the best alternatives in 2023. By now, it is certain that having a good Log Management solution is a must, so the question is not when should you start, but which tool should you use.

Other useful resources, if you are considering Dynatrace alternatives:

• Dynatrace vs. Datadog comparison
• Datadog alternatives
• New Relic alternatives
• Splunk alternatives