10 Best Mezmo (LogDNA) Alternatives in 2024

Mezmo (formerly known as LogDNA) is a SaaS service allowing you to ingest, process, route, analyze and store your logs. It is a scalable log management solution that supports logs originating from any source, including applications, cloud systems, Kubernetes, on-premise servers, and more.

Mezmo offers multiple tools for managing logs built-in and a web UI. Via its UI, you can view logs in real-time, search, parse, visualize data, or set alerts. You can also benefit from advanced features and create custom parsing rules, export logs, and more. Mezmo uses their Mezmo agent to send logs, or you can use multiple log ingestion integrations.

Mezmo's pricing starts at $3/month with $1.5/GB quota and a 7 days retention period. Their free plan is called Community and offers a solution for 1 user, without any data retention.

Pros:

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

Cons:

• Customer Support
• Building custom filters can get difficult

The Best Mezmo alternatives in 2023

1. Better Stack

Better Stack is a much faster and at the same less expensive alternative to Mezmo. With Better Stack, you can get 1 GB of data for $0.25, thanks to a custom-built technology and storage based on ClickHouse. Better Stack 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. 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.

By offering integrations into stacks like Kubernetes, Heroku, Logstash, Rails, Docker, AWS, and more, you get a broad array of options for monitoring. All the collected data are sent to Grafana for comprehensive visualization and more efficient intel management.

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.

If you need a log monitoring solution for your hobby project, Better Stack 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 Better Stack:

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

2. Sematext

Sematext is a monitoring and logging service. It allows for centralized logging and provides you with 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 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, whose infrastructure follows strict IT security best practices. Your logs are encrypted via HTTPS and sent through TLS/SLL channels. You can restrict specific permissions to some members of your team.

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

3. Graylog

Graylog is a log management solution allowing log parsing, visualization, or analysis. It is based on Elasticsearch and MongoDB. The Dashboard comprises widgets, each providing you with different information coming from different datatypes. You can see counts, charts, graphs, views, and more.

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. The UI is definitely much better looking. However, Graylog's websites are not definitely a designer's paradise.

Main Benefits of Graylog:

• Even the free edition provides multiple functions
• Ability to search for different criteria without having to filter out the data manually
• Open-source option available

4. Logz.io

Logz.io is based on open source tools and heavily emphasizes the necessity of "giving back to the community", maybe that's why their free subscription plan is called Community. Logz.io 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

4. 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

5. Datadog

Datadog allows you to unify metrics, traces, logs, and events from more than 450 technologies. You can basically log without limits, ingest everything and then decide what to index with filters. Live Tail ensures you get real-time insights, and storage is taken care of centrally, so you leave nothing behind on the servers. Datadog is an intuitive platform that allows you to correlate individual logs and discover patterns, then visualize them on customizable, drag-and-drop dashboards. Logs querying can be done without the knowledge of any query language. Datadog's alerts are powered by machine learning that automatically detects anomalies and logs errors.

Main Benefits of Datadog

• Custom Processing and Parsers
• Full-text search
• Log-based custom metrics

6. Solarwinds Papertrail

Coming from the SolarWinds toolshed, Papertrail allows you to collate text log files from multiple sources and visualize them in one place. Papertrail's dashboard organizes and visualizes application logs, text log data, and syslog.

Papertrail, while we ignore its web, customer support, and website issues, remains one of the most powerful tools to extract, parse, and query logs. It supports many languages and platforms such as Android, C#, .NET, Docker, Java, JavaScript, MySQL, Node, and many more. Papertrail also supports real-time log collection and visualization.

Papertrail stores logs in the .tsv format, which helps with the compression, and it can show duplicate or similar messages, download archives through API key, or retrieve multiple archives on one requirement.

Papertrail offers either a custom plan builder or multiple pre-set bundles, which depend on the archive period, data search availability, and the amount of data ingested each month. You can also pick Papertrail’s free subscription, however, this offers only one time 16GB of data package followed by a 50MB/month cap.

Main Benefits of Papertrail:

• Configurable alerts
• Custom Plan Builder

7. Splunk

Splunk is a relatively new and modern log management and monitoring solution. You can also use it on mobile, and it provides support for augmented reality.

Apart from log management, Splunk provides you with searching, filtering, diagnosing, indexing, and reporting features. It also offers intuitive and user-friendly dashboards which can be divided into multiple relevant sections. Splunk uses distributed tracing, a method to monitor events, failures, or performance issues.

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 provides multiple additional features on the other hand. These include live logging, S3 backup, Heroku support, Github integration, JIRA integration, and more.

Main Benefits of Splunk:

• Support for various features like S3 backup, live, logging, Heroku, Github, and more
• Flexible GUI, support for a query language
• Complex, suitable for an enterprise solution

8. 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.

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

9. 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

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 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.

Main Benefits of Google Cloud Logging:

• Pricing
• a great solution for GCP

Conclusion

In this article, we took a closer look at Mezmo, its strong and weak aspects. Then we proposed a list of the best Mezmo alternatives in 2023. The rest is up to you, try to take a closer look at the solutions, compare them and pick one, that will help your project the most.