10 Log Analysis Tools in 2024

Log analysis is a part of a bigger set of practices called and often uses the help of AI or Machine Learning algorithms to properly interpret and process log data coming in. Since logs come from multiple sources, there are a lot of issues emerging such as different formatting and standards, absent or surplus data and more.

How Does Log Analysis Work?

You need to make sure that you can extract the correct data from your logs and then further analyze, monitor and visualize them. In order to do that you need to:

• Collect data from multiple sources
• Centralize logs in one platform
• Make your logs searchable by indexing them
• Search for patterns and Analyze Query outcomes
• Set up Monitoring and Alerting
• Report and Dashboard

Main Uses of Log Analysis:

There are multiple reasons why should you have a log analysis tool set up.

Log analysis is often performed in order to:

• Ensure compliance with audits, regulations, and/or specific security policies
• System troubleshooting
• Security incident response and investigation
• Real User Behavior Analysis

There any many more uses for log analysis outside of the usual public market, such as official investigations and forensics.

10 Best Log Analysis Tools and Software in 2023

Now that we’ve established the basics, it’s time to look at the best log analysis software in 2023. Most of these tools offer a complete log management solution and range from open-source and freemium, all the way to enterprise-ready solutions.

1. Better Stack

Better Stack Logs 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:

• Inexpensive and extremely efficient ClickHouse based tool
• Integration with Better Stack Uptime, enabling even better observability
• Pricing starts at $0.25

2. Dynatrace

Dynatrace offers Log Management 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.

Main Benefits of Dynatrace:

• 2 different products are available (v1 and v2)
• Dynatrace is an All-in-one platform

3. Logmind

Logmind offers an AI-powered log data intelligence platform allowing you to automate log analysis, break down silos and gain visibility across your stack and increase the effectiveness of root cause analyses. Logmind automatically detects errors in real-time from log files using advanced ML techniques and in case of any error, can alert you in third-party tools.

Logmind enables you to monitor your infrastructure by automatically identifying errors and suggesting solutions. You can also monitor your network infrastructure and spot network issues. Logmind also covers your applications’ performance and security.

Logmind is cloud-based, meaning that it remains scalable and deployment does not take a long time. Logmind can integrate with applications built in python, java, Node.js, MongoDB, work with multiple networks, cloud infrastructures such as AWS, Azure, Docker, or GCP, and also cooperate with security platforms and tools.

Main Benefits of Logmind:

• AI-powered solution using advanced ML techniques
• A variety of integrations available

4. LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor offers log intelligence at scale for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Your data are centralized, correlated, and contextualized, emphasizing 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 levels without compromising functions

5. 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.

However Datadog comes at a significant cost, compared to the other tools on the list.

Main Benefits of Datadog:

• Full-observability achievable
• Security monitoring capacities

6. 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

7. 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:

• Ability to search for different criteria without having to filter out the data manually
• Open-source option available

8. 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

9. Logit.io

Logit.io offers automation, analysis, and alerting solutions built on the combination of Elastic stack and Grafana. Logit.io offers multiple complete log management solutions combined with Application Performance Monitoring and ELK hosting or ELK as a service.

Logit.io is built upon the Open Distro, allowing you to build a secure Elastic Stack or Elasticsearch cluster. Logit.io provides you with complete visibility across your stack and data inputs and offers alerting, log monitoring, reporting, and data visualization.

Thanks to Logit.io’s centralized logging, you can leverage its security features, improve threat detection, and incident identification, and make sure that your service always meets compliance standards and local regulations.

Main Benefits of Logit.io:

• Managed Open Distro
• Managed ELK stack

10. Sematext Logs

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:

• Easy to use with good pre-configured dashboards and reports thus also quick to start
• No need for a lengthy configuration

Conclusion

This article introduced Log Analysis as a part of the greater Log Management set of practices. You learned the basics, including the main benefits of Log Analysis, how does it work, and how it’s used in practice. By now, it is certain that having a good Log Analysis solution is a must, so the question is not when should you start, but which tool is the right one for you.