10 Log Management and Aggregation tools in 2024

Logs contain valuable information about the overall state and performance of your software, but also a lot of information you don’t really need. Extracting the data, you need from an endless sea of logs produced by modern architecture on your own is impossible. Thankfully, there are multiple Log Management and Aggregation Tools doing that for you.

What is Log Management?

Log Management consists of perpetual aggregation, storing, processing, and analyzing logs from every aspect of your architecture. Data mined from these logs are used to evaluate real-time and historical performance, performance trends, issues, identify bottlenecks and anomalies, tighten security and make sure you deliver what you promised.

Log Management is still a broad term and can be further dissected into multiple areas:

• Log collection and transport - To get real-time insight into logs, you need to transport logs using either an API or by configuring individual loggings to log directly into the centralized log manager. At the same time, you need to think about packet loss and how to prevent it.
• Log storing - A good log management solution stores your logs in a structured fashion, in secure and reliable storage.
• Log Indexing and Searching - Using a Log management solution, you can search through your logs and do the digging on your own.
• Log Analysis - Comprehensive analysis of individual logs depends on properly distributing them into categories, visualization, and understanding reoccurring patterns or developing trends. A lot of this is nowadays handled by AI and ML.
• Log Monitoring  - Monitoring the data in your logs will help you find any anomalies or overstepped thresholds.
• Alerting - After setting thresholds and understanding your software's behavior, you can integrate your monitoring solution with incident management tools. This way, you will be instantly alerted if anything goes south.
• Reporting - Based on analyses, monitors, and alerts, you can receive comprehensive reports, which will help you better understand your infrastructure’s performance. You can also use these reports to inform stakeholders about the performance of your project.

Benefits of having a Log Management Solution

• Centralized Logging
• Improved Security
• Better Monitoring Capabilities and better observability
• Evidence-based planning
• Faster troubleshooting, root-cause analyses, and easier maintenance

The Best Log Management Tools and Software in 2023

Now that we went over the basics, let’s take a look at the best Log Management and Aggregation tools in 2023.

1. Logtail

Logtail is a log management and analysis tool from Better Stack. It allows you to query your logs the same way you'd query your database with SQL-compatible structured log management. Logtail 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.

By offering integrations into stacks like Kubernetes, Heroku, Logstash, Rails, Docker, AWS, and more, you get a broad array of options for monitoring. Thanks to custom-built technology and 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.

Using Logtail’s advanced Collaboration features you can archive important log fragments, comment, and share logs with your colleagues. On top of that, everything is put together in a simple, purpose-driven, Dark-mode UI.

Tighter security is one of the main priorities in log monitoring, and Logtail 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.

If you need a log monitoring solution for your hobby project, Logtail is available for free. You get access to 1 GB of storage a month, with 3-day data retention. For $24/month, you get access to the Freelancer package, with 30 GB of log storage and 15-day data retention.

Main Benefits of Logtail:

• A one-click filter of logs in a structured format
• Better Uptime integration for a full-stack monitoring solution

2. Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic offers a complete set of log management tools for the entire stack, whether cloud, on-premises, or hybrid. 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 as 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 the specific errors and exceptions to be able to focus on them in the future.

See more similar tools to Sumo Logic.

Main Benefits of Sumo Logic:

• A free limited version is provided to you to test out the service
• It allows you to ingest the logs from your network directly and in real-time
• The application also offers extensive REST API
• GUI is easy to grasp, thus making it quicker to start

3. Coralogix

Coralogix enables you to centralize logs, metrics, and security data from all over your stack. After ingestion, data are analyzed, and Coralogix provides you with common trends and patterns that make a further prediction or issues analysis easier. Coralogix automatically parses your logs and enriches the data using their parsing wizard, an automatic parsing for JSON logs. You can enrich logs using a pre-defined, custom data source and add important business, operation, or security information.

Coralogix benefits from Machine Learning and Anomaly Detection. ML algorithms help discover any abnormalities without the need for pre-setting thresholds or other rules. Visualization is made easier thanks to their UI, Kibana, Grafana, SQL clients, Tableau or CLI, and APIs. Coralogix also offers support for multiple syntaxes, including ELK syntax.

Coralogix is an enterprise-ready solution thanks to GDPR, SOC2, PCI, and HIPAA certifications.

Coralogix’s pricing is based on a per GB price and starts at $0.60 for Monitoring Data, $1.80/GB of Frequently Searched Data, and $0.22/GB for compliance data.

Main Benefits of Coralogix:

• ML anomaly detection
• Integrations,

4. 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 levels without compromising functions

5. Loggly

Loggly is a log management and aggregation tool from SolarWinds. It is currently one of the most commonly used solutions on the market. Loggly is an agentless log analyzer gathering data directly from application servers. Using a token, or the standard Syslog with HTTP(s), Loggly can retrieve data from pre-existing software.

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-ng, 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.

Main Benefits of Loggly:

• SolarWinds Backing

6. Papertrail

Papertrail aggregates and analyses logs from various sources that come in different types. That includes syslogs, .txt log files, Apache, MySQL, Ruby on Rails, Windows Events, Tomcat, Heroku, or logs from apps, routers, or firewalls.

Logs are scanned for any anomalies or deviations, and if needed, real-time alerts and summaries are displayed. Papertrail offers support for multiple languages and platforms, including Angular, Linux Logging Software and Log Management, Ruby, NGINX, MySQL, Javascript, HAproxy, and Golang. With the ability to create per-user access control protocols, you do not compromise consistency or data security and integrity by giving access to multiple team members.

You can get Papertrail for free with 48 hours search window, seven days archive, and a 16 GB first month bonus followed by a 50 MB/month quota. If you are looking for paid packages, Papertrail's bundles start at $7/month.

Main Benefits of Papertrail:

• Solarwinds backing

7. Logstash

Logstash is a free and open server-side data processing pipeline for data ingestion from multiple sources. Logstash is a part of the ELK stack - Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Logstash ingests, transforms, and transfers your data of any format or complexity and allows you to derive structure from unstructured data using grok or collect geo coordinates from IP addresses. Logstash supports a variety of outputs that allows you to route your data with flexibility and according to your needs. Thanks to more than 200 plugins, Logstash is quite customizable, and if you won't find what you're looking for, you can always use their API for plugin development.

Elastic is available both as Elastic Cloud, a public cloud managed service available on all the major platforms, or a fully configurable and customizable Elastic Stack available for download. Elastic Cloud starter premium package is Standard and starts at $16/month.

Main benefits of Logstash:

• It is an integral part of the ELK stack ecosystem
• Elastic Maps Server
• Advanced alerting tools

8. 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

9. 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 in order 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. Google Cloud Logging starts at $0.5/GiB (1 GiB is approx 1.07GB, however, these are used interchangeably)

Main Benefits of Google Cloud Logging:

• Huge Google Backing, including various courses and lectures
• Great GCP tool

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/Fluentd:

• Community developed plugins
• Lightweight solution

Conclusion

In this article, we went over the basics of Log Management and Aggregation. We explained why it’s so important to keep track of all of your logs, have them consistently delivered, monitored, and analyzed. Then we proposed a list of the best Log Management solutions in 2023.

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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